A Visit from the Goon Squad
by rentAgleek
Summary: 'We need each other' Rachel and Jesse have a complex relationship. Happiness. Heartbreak. WARNING: contains drugs, sex and swearing. I promise the story is better than the summary. Please read!
1. Found Objects

_**New story. This is based on Jennifer Egan's AMAZING novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, it's my favourite book. This story features every glee character, but everything ties back to Rachel and Jesse. Please review!**_

_**DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, nor do I own A Visit from the Goon Squad, unfortunatley...**_

**Chapter One: ****Found Objects**

It began in the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Rachel was adjusting her yellow eyeshadow when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Rachel to recognise, looking back, that the peeing woman's trust must have provoked her: _We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back?_ It only made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Rachel always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her – it always seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously ('I get it', Kurt, her therapist, said) and take the fucking thing.

'You mean steal it.' He was trying to get Rachel to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Kurt referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she'd used to sign debit-card slips, to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online which she'd lifted from her former boss's lawyer during a contracts meeting. Rachel no longer took anything from stores – their cold, inert goods didn't tempt her. Only from people.

'Okay', she said. 'Steal it.'

Rachel and Kurt had dubbed that feeling she got the 'personal challenge', as in: taking the wallet was a way for Rachel to assert her toughness, her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. That would be the cure, though Kurt never used words like 'cure'. He wore funky shirts and let her call him Kurt, but he was old-school inscrutable, to the point where Rachel couldn't tell if he was gay or straight, if he'd written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside people's skulls. Of course, these questions could have been resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions (according to Kurt) and so far, Rachel had resisted.

The couch where she lay in his office was blue leather and very soft. Kurt liked the couch, he'd told her, because it relieved them both of the burden of eye contact. 'You don't like eye contact?', Rachel had asked. It seemed like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.

'I find it tiring', he'd said. 'This way, we can both look where we want.'

'Where will you look?'

He smiled. 'You can see my options.'

'Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch?'

'Around the room', Kurt said. 'At the ceiling. Into space.'

'Do you ever sleep?'

'No.'

Rachel usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight, as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. She'd glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. She'd plucked it from the woman's bag and slipped it into her own small handbag, which she'd zipped shut before the sound of peeing had stopped. She'd flicked open the bathroom door and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallet's owner had never seen each other.

Prewallet, Rachel had been in the gripe of a dire evening: lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark curls, sometimes glancing at the flatscreen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Rachel's admittedly overhandled tales of Jesse St James, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow's Ear record label and who also (Rachel happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee – as an aphrodisiac, she suspected – and sprayed pesticide in his armpits.

Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility. Rachel felt the waiters eyeing her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight. She sat down and took a sip of her Melon Madness Martini and cocked her head at Blaine. She smiled her yes/no smile.

'Hello,' she said. The yes/no smile was amazingly effective.

'You're happy,' Blaine said.

'I'm always happy,' Rachel said. 'Sometimes I just forget.'

Blaine had paid the bill while she was in the bathroom – clear proof that he'd been on the verge of aborting their date. Now he studied her. 'You feel like going somewhere else?'

They stood. Blaine wore black cords and a white button up shirt. He was a legal secretary. On e-mail he'd been fanciful, almost goofy, but in person he seemed simultaneously anxious and bored. She could tell that he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he'd played in high school and college. Rachel, who was thirty-five, had passed that point. Still, not even Kurt knew her real age. The closest anyone had come to guessing it was thirty-one, and most put her in her twenties. She worked out daily and avoided the sun. Her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.

As she followed Blaine from the bar, she couldn't resist unzipping her purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.

'You're aware of how the theft makes _you_ feel', Kurt said. 'To the point where you remind yourself of it to improve your mood. But do you think about the how it makes the other person feel?'

Rachel tipped her head back to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Kurt that she wasn't an idiot – she knew the question had a right answer. She and Kurt were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she'd made when she first came to New York; a set of goals she'd scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:

_**Find a band to manage**_

_**Understand the news**_

_**Study Japanese**_

_**Practice the harp**_

'I don't think this is about people,' Rachel said.

'But it isn't that you lack empathy,' Kurt said. 'We know that, because of the plumber.'

Rachel sighed. She'd told Kurt the plumber story about a month ago, and he'd found a way to bring it up almost every lesson ever since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Rachel's landlord to investigate a leak in the apartment below hers. He'd appeared in Rachel's doorway, tufts of grey on his head, and within a minute – _boom _– he'd hit the floor and crawled under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole. The fingers he'd groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white back. Rachel turned away, stricken by the old man's abasement, anxious to leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking about the length and frequency of her showers. 'I never use it', she told him curtly. 'I shower at the gym.' He nodded without acknowledging her rudeness, apparently used to it. Rachel's nose began to prickle; she shut her eyes and pushed hard on both temples.

Opening her eyes, she saw the plumber's tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling. Rachel felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt. Not a bangle jangled; her bony hands were spastic at most things, but she was good at this – _made for it_, she often thought, in the first drifty moments after lifting something. And once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.

'And what about after he'd gone?', Kurt had asked when Rachel told him the story. 'How did the screwdriver look to you then?'

There was a pause. 'Normal,' she said.

'Really. Not special anymore?'

'Like any screwdriver'

Rachel had heard Kurt shift behind her and felt something happen in the room: the screwdriver, which she'd placed on the table (recently supplemented with a second table) where she kept the things she'd lifted, and which she'd barely looked at since, seemed to hang in the air of Kurt's office. It floated between them: a symbol.

'And how did you feel?' Kurt asked quietly. 'About having taken it from the plumber you pitied?'

How did she feel? _How did she feel?_ There was a right answer, of course. At times, Rachel had to fight the urge to lie as a way of simply depriving Kurt of it.

'Bad,' she said. 'Okay? I felt bad. Shit, I'm bankrupting myself to pay for you – obviously I get that this isn't a great way to live.'

More than once, Kurt had tried to connect the plumber to Rachel's father, who had disappeared when she was six. She was careful not to indulge this line of thinking. 'I don't remember him', she told Kurt. 'I have nothing to say.' She did this for Kurt's protection and her own – they were writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that direction lay only sorrow.

Rachel and Blaine crossed the lobby of the Lassimo Hotel in the direction of the street. Rachel hugged her purse to her shoulder, the warm ball of wallet snuggled in her armpit. As they passed the angular budded branches by the big glass doors to the street, a woman zigzagged into their path. 'Wait,' she said. 'You haven't seen – I'm desperate.'

Rachel felt a twang of terror. It was the woman whose wallet she had taken – she knew this instantly, although the person before her had nothing in common with the blithe, raven haired woman she'd pictured. This woman had vulnerable brown eyes and flat pointy shoes that clicked too loudly on the marble floor. There was plenty of grey in her frizzy brown hair.

Rachel took Blaine's arm, trying to steer him through the doors. She felt his pulse of surprise at her touch, but he stayed put. 'Have we seen what?', he said.

'Someone stole my wallet. My ID is gone, and I have to catch a plane tomorrow morning. I'm just desperate!' She stared beseechingly at both of them. It was the sort of frank need that New Yorkers quickly learn how to hide, and Rachel recoiled. It had never occurred to her that the woman was from out of town.

'Have you called the police?', Blaine asked.

'The concierge said he would call. But I'm also wondering – could it have fallen out somewhere?', she looked helplessly at the marble floor around their feet. Rachel relaxed slightly. This woman was the type who annoyed people without meaning to; apology shadowed her movements even now, as she followed Blaine to the concierge desk. Rachel trailed behind.

'Is someone helping this person?' she heard Blaine ask.

The concierge was young and spiky haired. 'We've called the police', he said defensively.

Blaine turned to the woman. 'Where did this happen?'

'In the ladies' room. I think.'

'Who else was there?'

'No one'

'It was empty?'

'There might have been someone, but I didn't see her.'

Blaine swung around to Rachel. 'You were just in the bathroom,' he said. 'Did you see anyone?'

'No,' she managed to say. She had Xanax in her purse, but she couldn't open her purse. Even with it zipped, she feared that the wallet would blurt into view in some way that she couldn't control, unleashing a cascade of horrors: arrest, shame, poverty, death.

Blaine turned to the concierge. 'How come I'm asking these questions instead of you?' he said. 'Someone just got robbed in your hotel. Don't you have, like, security?'

The words 'robbed' and 'security' managed to pierce the soothing backbeat that pumped through not just the Lassimo but every hotel like it in New York City. There was a mild ripple of interest from the lobby.

'I've called security', the concierge said, adjusting his neck. 'I'll call them again.'

Rachel glanced at Blaine. He was angry, and the anger made him recognisable in a way that an hour of aimless chatter (mostly hers, it was true) had not: he was new to New York. He came from someplace smaller. He had a thing or two to prove about how people should treat one another.

Two security guys showed up, the same on TV and in life: beefy guys whose scrupulous politeness was somehow linked to their willingness to crack skulls. They dispersed to search the bar. Rachel wished feverishly that she'd left the wallet there, as if this were an impulse she'd barely resisted. 'I'll check the bathroom', she told Blaine, and forced herself to walk slowly around the elevator bank.

The bathroom was empty. Rachel opened her purse, took out the wallet, unearthed her vial of Xanax, and popped one between her teeth. They worked faster if you chewed them. As the caustic taste flooded her mouth, she scanned the room, trying to decide where to ditch the wallet: In the stall? Under the sink? The decision paralysed her. She had to do this right, to emerge unscathed, and if she could, if she did – she had a frenzied sense of making a promise to Kurt.

The bathroom door opened, and the woman walked in. Her frantic eyes met Rachel's in the bathroom mirror: narrow, green, equally frantic. There was a pause, during which Rachel felt that she was being confronted; the woman knew, had known all along. Rachel handed her the wallet. She saw, from the woman's stunned expression, that she was wrong.

'I'm sorry,' Rachel said quickly. 'It's a problem I have.' The woman opened the wallet. Her physical relief at having it back coursed through Rachel in a warm rush, as if their bodies had fused. 'Everything's there, I swear. I didn't even open it. It's this problem I have, but I'm getting help. I just – please don't tell. I'm hanging on by a thread.'

The woman glanced up, her soft brown eyes moving over Rachel's face. What did she see? Rachel wished that she could turn and peer in the mirror again, as if something about herself might at last be revealed – some lost thing. But she didn't turn. She held still and let the woman look. It struck her that the woman was close to her own age – her real age. She probably had children at home.

'Okay,' the woman said, looking down. 'It's between us.'

'Thank you,' Rachel said. 'Thank you, thank you.' Relief and the first gentle waves of Xanax made her feel faint, and she leaned against the wall. She sensed the woman's eagerness to get away. She longed to slide to the floor.

There was a rap in the door, a man's voice: 'Any luck?'

Rachel and Blaine left the hotel and stepped into desolate, windy Tribeca. She'd suggested the Lassimo out of habit; it was near Sow's Ear Records, where she'd worked for twelve years as Jesse St James' assistant. But she hated the neighbourhood at night without the World Trade Centre, whose blazing free-ways of light had always filled her with hope. She was tired of Blaine. In a mere twenty minutes, they'd blown past the desired point of meaningful-connection-through-shared-experience into the less appealing state of knowing-each-other-too-well.

Blaine wore a knit cap pulled over his forehead. His eyelashes were long and black. 'That was weird,' he said finally.

'Yeah,' Rachel said. Then, after a pause, 'You mean, finding it?'

'The whole thing. But yeah.' He turned to her. 'Was it, like, concealed from view?'

'It was lying on the floor. In the corner. Kind of behind a planter.' The utterance of this lie caused pinpricks of sweat to emerge on Rachel's Xanax-soothed skull. She considered saying, _Actually, there was no planter_, but managed not to.

'It's kind of like she did it on purpose', Blaine said. 'For attention or something.'

'She didn't seem like that type.'

'You can't tell. That's something I'm learning, here in NYC: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They're not even two-faced – they're, like, multiple personalities.'

'She wasn't from New York', Rachel said, irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it. 'Remember? She was getting on a plane.'

'True,' Blaine said. He paused and cocked his head, regarding Rachel across the ill-lit sidewalk. 'But you know what I'm talking about? That thing about people?'

'I do know,' she said carefully. 'But I think you get used to it.'

'I'd rather just go somewhere else.'

It took Rachel a moment to understand. 'There is nowhere else,' she said.

Blaine turned to her, startled. Then he grinned. Rachel grinned back – not the yes/no smile, but related.

'That's ridiculous,' Blaine said.

They took a cab and climbed the four flights to Rachel's Lower East Side walkup. She'd lived there for six years. The place smelled of scented candles, and there was a velvet throw cloth on her sofa bed and lots of pillows, and an old color TV with a very good picture, and an array of souvenirs from her travels lining the windowsills: a white seashell, a pair of red dice, a small canister of Tiger Balm from Singapore, now dried to the texture of rubber, a tiny bonsai tree that she watered faithfully.

'Look at this,' Blaine said. 'You've got a tub in the kitchen! I've heard of that—I mean I've read about it, but I wasn't sure there were any left. The shower part is new, right? This is a bathtub-in-the-kitchen apartment, right?'

'Yup,' Rachel said. 'But I almost never use it. I shower at the gym.'

The tub was covered with a fitted board. Rachel kept her plates stacked on top of it. Blaine ran his hands around the rim of the bath and examined its clawed feet. Rachel took a bottle of grappa from the kitchen cupboard and filled two small glasses.

'I love this place,' Blaine said. 'It feels like old New York. You know this stuff is around, but how do you find it?'

Rachel leaned against the tub beside him and took a tiny sip of grappa. She was trying to remember Blaine's age on his profile. Twenty-eight, she thought, but he seemed younger than that, maybe a lot younger. She saw her apartment as he must see it—a flash of local color that would fade almost instantly into the swirl of adventures that everyone has on first coming to New York. It jarred Rachel to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Blaine would struggle to organize a year or two from now: _Where was that place with the bathtub_?_ Who was that girl_?

He left the tub to explore the rest of the apartment. To one side of the kitchen was Rachel's bedroom. On the other side, facing the street, was her living room-den-office, which contained two upholstered chairs and the desk she reserved for projects outside of work—publicity for bands she believed in, short reviews for _Vibe_ and _Spin_—although these had fallen off sharply in recent years. In fact, the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Rachel, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it—as if she not only couldn't move on but didn't want to.

Blaine leaned over to peer at the tiny collection on Rachel's windowsills. He hadn't noticed the tables where she kept the pile of things she'd stolen: the pens, the binoculars, the keys, the child's scarf, which she'd lifted simply by not returning it when it dropped from a little girl's neck as her mother led her by the hand from a Starbucks. Rachel was already seeing Kurt by then, so she recognized the litany of excuses even as they throbbed through her head: winter is almost over; children grow so fast; kids hate scarves; it's too late, they're out the door; I'm embarrassed to return it; I could easily not have seen it fall—in fact, I didn't, I'm just noticing it now. _Look, a scarf! A kid's bright-yellow scarf with pink stripes—too bad, who could it belong to_?_ Well, I'll just pick it up and hold it for a minute_. . . . At home, she'd washed the scarf by hand and folded it neatly. It was one of the things she liked best.

'What's all this?' Blaine asked.

He'd discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Rachel's eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Rachel moved closer to Blaine, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in.

'And how did you feel, standing with Blaine in front of all those things you'd stolen?' Kurt asked.

Rachel turned her face into the blue couch because her cheeks were heating up and she hated that. She didn't want to explain to Kurt the mix of feelings she'd had, standing there with Blaine: the pride she took in these objects, a tenderness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition. She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

Watching Blaine move his eyes over the pile of objects stirred something in Rachel. She put her arms around him from behind, and he turned, surprised, but willing. She kissed him full on the mouth, then undid his zipper and kicked off her boots. Blaine tried to lead her toward the other room, where they could lie down on the sofa bed, but Rachel dropped to her knees beside the tables and pulled him down, the Persian carpet prickling her back, street light falling through the window onto his hungry, hopeful face, his bare white thighs.

Afterward, they lay on the rug for a long time. The candles started to sputter. Rachel saw the prickly shape of the bonsai silhouetted against the window near her head. All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she'd been gouged. She tottered to her feet, hoping that Blaine would leave soon. He still had his shirt on.

'You know what I feel like doing?' he said, standing up. 'Taking a bath in that tub.'

'You can,' Rachel said dully. 'It works. The plumber was just here.'

She pulled up her jeans and collapsed onto a chair. Blaine went to the tub and lifted off the cover. Water gushed from the faucet. Its force had always startled Rachel, the few times she'd used it.

Blaine's black pants were crumpled on the floor at Rachel's feet. The square of his wallet had worn away the corduroy from one of the back pockets, as if he often wore these pants, and always with the wallet in that place. Rachel glanced over at him. Steam rose from the tub as he dipped in a hand to test the water. Then he came back to the pile of objects and leaned close, as if looking for something specific. Rachel watched him, hoping for a tremor of the excitement she'd felt before, but it was gone.

'Can I put some of these in?' He was holding up a packet of bath salts that Rachel had taken from her best friend, Holly, a couple of years ago, before they'd stopped speaking. The salts were still in their polka-dot wrapping. They'd been deep in the middle of the pile, which had collapsed a little from the extraction. How had Blaine even seen them?

Rachel hesitated. She and Kurt had talked at length about why she kept the stolen objects separate from the rest of her life: because using them would imply greed or self-interest, because leaving them untouched made it seem as if she might one day give them back, because piling them in a heap kept their power from leaking away.

'I guess,' she said. 'I guess you can.' She was aware of having made a move in the story that she and Kurt were writing, of having taken a symbolic step. But toward the happy ending, or away from it?

She felt Blaine's hand on the back of her head, stroking her hair. 'You like it hot?' he asked. 'Or medium?'

'Hot,' she said. 'Really, really hot.'

'Me, too.'

He went back to the tub and fiddled with the knobs and shook in some of the salts, and the room instantly filled with a steamy plantlike odor that was deeply familiar to Rachel: the smell of Holly's bathroom, from the days when Rachel used to shower there after she and Holly went running together in Central Park.

'Where are your towels?' Blaine called.

She kept them folded in a basket in the bathroom. Blaine went to get them, then shut the bathroom door. Rachel heard him starting to pee. She knelt on the floor and slipped his wallet from his pants pocket and opened it, her heart firing with a sudden pressure.

It was a plain black wallet, worn to gray along the edges. Rapidly she flicked among its contents: a debit card, a work ID, a gym card. In a side pocket, a faded picture of two boys and a girl in braces, squinting on a beach. A sports team in yellow uniforms, heads so small she couldn't tell if one of them belonged to Blaine. From among these dog-eared photos, a scrap of binder paper dropped into Rachel's lap. It looked very old, the edges torn, the pale-blue lines rubbed almost away. Rachel unfolded it and saw written, in blunt pencil, '**I BELIEVE IN YOU**.' She froze, staring at the words. They seemed to tunnel toward her from their meagre scrap, bringing a flush of embarrassment for Blaine, who'd kept this disintegrating tribute in his disintegrating wallet, and then shame at herself for having looked at it. She was faintly aware of the faucet being turned on, and of the need to move quickly.

Hastily, mechanically, she reassembled the wallet, keeping the slip of paper in her hand. I'm just going to hold this, she was aware of telling herself as she tucked the wallet back into Blaine's pocket. I'll put it back later; he probably doesn't remember it's in there. I'll actually be doing him a favor by getting it out of the way before someone finds it. I'll say, _Hey, I noticed this on the rug, is it yours_? And he'll say, _That_?_ I've never seen it before—it must be yours, Rachel. _And maybe that's true. Maybe someone gave it to me years ago, and I forgot.

'And did you? Put it back?' Kurt asked.

'I didn't have a chance. He came out of the bathroom.'

'And what about later? After the bath? Or the next time you saw him?'

'After the bath, he put on his pants and left. I haven't talked to him since.'

There was a pause, during which Rachel was keenly aware of Kurt behind her, waiting. She wanted badly to please him, to say something like _It was a turning point; everything feels different now_, or _I called Holly and we made up, finally_, or _I've picked up the harp again_, or just, _I'm changing, I'm changing, I'm changing_. _I've changed!_ Redemption, transformation—God, how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

'Please,' she told Kurt. 'Don't ask me how I feel.'

'All right,' he said quietly.

They sat in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them. Rachel looked at the windowpane, rinsed with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Kurt's time: another, then another, then one more.

**_Next chapter, we meet Jesse. REVIEW!_**


	2. The Gold Cure

**__****I don't normally update once a day so don't get excited, but I was bored today. thanks to all of you who subscribed/favourited. PLEASE REVIEW THIS CHAPTER!**

**__****DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, nor do I own A Visit from the Goon Squad, unfortunatley...**

**Chapter Two: The Gold Cure**

The shame memories began early that day for Jesse, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Jesse had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back. Then, Stop/Go had seemed like an excellent bet; the sisters were young and adorable, their sound was gritty and simple and catchy ('Cyndi Lauper meets Chrissie Hynde' had been Jesse's line early on), with a big gulping bass and some fun percussion – he recalled a cowbell. Plus they'd written decent songs; hell, they'd sold twenty thousand CDs off the stage before Jesse ever heard them play. A little time to develop potential singles, some clever marketing, and a decent video could put them over the top.

But the sisters were pushing thirty, his executive producer, Giselle, informed Jesse now, and no longer credible as recent high-school grads, especially since one of them had a nine year old daughter. Their band members were in law school. They'd fired two producers, and a third had quit. Still no album.

'Who's managing them?' Jesse asked.

'Their father. I've got their new rough mix,' Giselle said. 'The vocals are buried under seven layers of guitar.'

It was then that the memory overcame Jesse (had the word 'sisters' brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying – twenty years ago was it? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who'd taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Jesse could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns' voices echoing deep in his ears.

He'd set up a meeting with their Mother Superior – the only nun you could talk to – brought along a couple of girls from the office for camouflage, and waited in a kind of anteroom until the Mother Superior appeared behind a square opening in the wall like a window without glass. She wore all white, a cloth tightly encircling her face. Jesse remembered her laughing a lot, rosy cheeks lifting into swags, maybe from joy at the thought of bringing God into millions of homes, maybe at the novelty of an A and R guy in purple corduroy making his pitch. The deal was done in a matter of minutes.

He'd approached the cutout square to say goodbye (here, Jesse thrashed in his conference room chair, anticipating the moment it was all leading up to). The Mother Superior leaned forward slightly, tilting her head in a way that must have triggered something in Jesse, because he lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth: velvety skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half-second before the nun cried out and jerked away. Then pulling back, grinning through his dread, seeing her appalled, injured face.

'Jesse?' Giselle was standing in front of a console, holding the Stop/Go CD. Everyone seemed to be waiting. 'You want to hear this?'

But Jesse was caught in a loop from twenty years ago: lunging over the sill towards the Mother Superior like some haywire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again.

'No,' he groaned. He turned his sweating face into the rivery breeze that gusted through the windows of the old Tribeca coffee factory where Sow's Ear Records had moved six years ago and now occupied two floors. He'd never recorded the nuns. But the time he'd returned from the convent, a message had been waiting.

'I don't,' he told Giselle. 'I don't want to hear the mix.'

He felt shaken, soiled. Jesse dropped artists all the time, sometimes three in a week, but now his own shame tinged the Stop/Go sisters' failure, as if _he _were to blame. And that feeling was followed by a restless, opposing need to recall what had first excited him about the sisters – to feel that excitement again. 'Why don't I visit them?' he said suddenly.

Giselle looked startled, then suspicious, then worried, a succession that would have amused Jesse if he hadn't been so rattled. 'Really?' she asked.

'Sure. I'll do it today, after I see my kid.'

Jesse's assistant, Rachel, brought him coffee: cream and two sugars. He shimmied a tiny red enamelled box from his pocket, popped the tricky latch, pinched a few gold flakes between his trembling fingers, and released them into his cup. He'd begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency. Jesse's goal was more basic than potency: sex _drive_, his own having mysteriously expired. He wasn't sure quite when or quite why this had happened: The divorce from Tina? The battle over Nick? Having recently turned forty-four? The tender, circular burns on his left forearm, sustained at 'The Party', a recent debacle engineered by none other than Tina's former boss, who was now doing jail time?

The gold landed on the coffee's milky surface and spun wildly. Jesse was mesmerised by this spinning, which he took as evidence of the explosive gold-coffee chemistry. A frenzy of activity that led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times, Jesse didn't even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Jesse really want to live in such a world?

He sipped his golf-inflected coffee and glanced at Rachel's breasts, which had become the litmus test he used to gauge his improvement. He'd lusted after her for most of the years she'd worked for him, first as an intern, then a receptionist, finally his assistant (where she'd remained, oddly reluctant to become an executive in her own right) – and she's somehow managed to elude that lust without ever saying no, or hurting Jesse's feelings, or pissing him off. And now: Rachel's breasts in a thin yellow sweater, and Jesse felt nothing. Not a shiver of harmless excitement. Could he even get it up if he wanted to?

Driving to pick up his son, Jesse alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signalling rather than bona fide tape – everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Jesse and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) – above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Jesse knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was _digitization_, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. _An aesthetic holocaust!_ But Jesse knew better than to say this stuff aloud.

But the deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Jesse, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Jesse and his high school gang – Puck and April, Santana and Brittany – none of whom he'd seen in decades (except for that disturbing encounter with Puck in his office years ago), yet still believed he'd find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens (long defunct), in San Francisco, green-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there on Saturday night.

And then, as Jello Biafra was thrashing his way through 'Too Drunk to Fuck', Jesse's mind drifted to an awards ceremony a few years ago where he'd tried to introduce a jazz pianist as 'incomparable' and ended up calling her 'incompetent' before an audience of twenty-five hundred. He should never have tried for 'incomparable' – wasn't his word, too fancy; it stuck in his mouth every time he'd practiced his speech for Tina. But it suited the pianist, who had miles of shiny gold hair and had also (she'd let slip) graduated from Harvard. Jesse had cherished a rash dream of getting her into bed, feeling that hair sliding over his shoulders and chest.

He idled now in front of Nick's school, waiting for the memory spasm to pass. Driving in, he'd glimpsed his son crossing the athletic field with his friends. Nick had been skipping a little – actually skipping – tossing a ball in the air, but by the time he slumped into Jesse's yellow Porsche, any inkling of lightness was gone. Why? Did Nick somehow know about the botched awards ceremony? Jesse told himself this was nuts, yet was moved by an urge to confess the malapropism to his fourth grader. The Will to Divulge, Dr Hummel called this impulse, and had exhorted Jesse to write down the things he wanted to confide, rather than burden his son with them. Jesse did this now, scribbling down _incompetent_ on the back of a parking ticket he'd received the day before. Then, recalling the earlier humiliation, he added to the list _kissing Mother Superior_.

'So, Nick,' he said, 'whatcha feel like doing?'

'Don't know.'

'Any particular wishes?'

'Not really.'

Jesse looked helplessly out the window. A couple of months ago, Nick had asked if they could skip their weekly appointment with Dr Hummel and spend the afternoon 'doing whatever' instead. They hadn't gone back, a decision that Jesse now regretted; 'doing whatever' had led to desultory afternoons, often cut short by Nick's announcement that he had homework.

'How about some coffee?' Jesse suggested.

A spark of smile. 'Can I get a Frappuccino?'

'Don't tell your mother.'

Tina didn't approve of Nick drinking coffee – reasonable, given that the kid was nine – but Jesse couldn't resist the exquisite connection that came of defying his ex-wife in unison. Betrayal Bonding, Dr Hummel called this, and, like the Will to Divulge, it was on the list of no-no's.

They got their coffees and returned to the Porsche to drink them. Nick sucked greedily at his Frappuccino. Jesse took out his red enamelled box, pinched a few gold flakes, and slipped them under the plastic lid of his cup.

'What's that?' Nick asked.

Jesse started. The gold was becoming so routine that he'd stopped being clandestine about it. 'Medicine,' he said after a moment.

'For what?'

'Some symptoms I've been having.' _Or not having_, he added mentally.

'What symptoms?'

Was this the Frappuccino kicking in? Nick had shifted out of his slump and now sat upright, regarding Jesse with his wide, dark, frankly beautiful eyes. 'Headaches,' Jesse said.

'Can I see it?' Nick asked. 'The medicine? In that red thing?'

Jesse handed over the tiny box. Within a couple of seconds, the kid had figured out the tricky latch and popped it open. 'Whoa, Dad,' he said. 'What is this stuff?'

'I told you.'

'It looks like gold. Flakes of gold.'

'It has a flaky consistency.'

'Can I taste one?'

'Son. You don't – '

'Just one?'

Jesse sighed. 'One.'

The boy carefully removed a gold flake and placed it on his tongue. 'What does it taste like?' Jesse couldn't help asking. He'd only consumed the gold in his coffee, where it had no discernible flavour.

'Like metal,' Nick said. 'It's awesome. Can I have another one?'

Jesse started the car. Was there something so obviously sham about the medicine story? Clearly the kid wasn't buying it. 'One more,' he said. 'And that's it.'

His son took a fat pinch of the gold flakes and put them on his tongue. Jesse tried not to think of the money. The truth was, he's spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months. A coke habit would have cost him less.

Nick sucked on the gold and closed his eyes. 'Dad,' he said. 'It's, like, waking me up from the inside.'

'Interesting,' Jesse murmured. 'That's exactly what it's supposed to do.'

'Is it working?'

'Sounds like it is.'

'But on you?' Nick said.

Jesse was fairly certain his son had asked him more questions in the past ten minutes that in the prior year and a half since he and Tina had split. Could this be a side effect of the gold: curiosity?

'I've still got headaches,' he said.

He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions ('doing whatever' involved a lot of aimless driving), every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Jesse that he hadn't had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved. Tina, meanwhile, had ascended to the city's number-one doubles team.

'Nick,' Jesse said. 'There's a musical group I need to visit – a pair of young sisters. Well, youngish sisters. I was planning to go later on, but if you're interested, we could – '

'Sure.'

'Really?'

'Yeah.'

Did 'sure' and 'really' mean that Nick was giving in to please Jesse, as Dr Hummel had noted he often did? Or had the gold incited curiosity extended to a new interest in Jesse's work? Nick had grown up around rock groups, of course, but he was part of the postpiracy generation, for whom things like 'copyright' and 'creative ownership' didn't exist.

Jesse didn't _blame_ Nick, of course; the dismantlers who had murdered the music business were a generation beyond his son, adults now. Still, he'd heeded Dr Hummel's advice to stop hectoring (Hummel's word) Nick about the industry's decline and focus instead on enjoying the music they both liked – Pearl Jam, for example, which Jesse blasted all the way to Mount Vernon.

The Stop/Go sisters still lived with their parents in a sprawling, run-down house under bushy suburban trees. Jesse had been here two or three years ago when he'd first discovered them, before he'd entrusted the sisters to a first in a series of executives who had failed to accomplish a blessed thing. As he and Nick left the car, the memory of his last visit provoked a convulsion of anger in Jesse that made heat roll up toward his head – why the fuck hadn't anything happened in all this time?

He found Rachel waiting at the door; she'd caught the train at Grand Central after Jesse called and had somehow beaten him here.

'Hiya Nick,' Rachel said, mussing his son's hair. She had known Nick all his life; she'd run out to Duane Reade to buy him pacifiers and diapers. Jesse glanced at her breasts; nothing. Or nothing sexual – he did feel and swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt towards the rest of his staff.

There was a pause. Yellow light scissored through the leaves. Jesse lifted his gaze from Rachel's breasts to her face. She had cheek dimples, wide brown eyes, wavy hair that ranged from chestnut to black, depending on the month. Today it was a deep chocolate caramel. She was smiling at Nick, but Jesse detected worry somewhere in the smile. He rarely thought of Rachel as an independent person, and beyond a vague awareness of boyfriends coming and going (vague at first out of respect for her privacy, lately out of indifference), he knew few specifics of her life. But seeing her outside this family home, Jesse experienced a flare of curiosity: Rachel had still been at NYU when he'd first met her at a Conduits gig at the Pyramid Club; that put her in her thirties now. Why hadn't she married? Did she want kids? She seemed suddenly older, or was it just that Jesse seldom looked directly at her face?

'What?' she said, feeling his stare.

'Nothing.'

'You okay?'

'Better than okay,' Jesse said, and gave the door a sharp knock.

The sisters looked fantastic – if not right out of high school, then at least right out of college, especially if they'd taken a year or two off or maybe transferred a couple of times. They wore their blonde hair pulled back from their faces, and their eyes were glittering, and they had a whole fucking book full of new material – _look at this!_ Jesse's fury at his team intensified, but it was pleasurable, motivating fury. The sisters' nervous excitement jittered up the house; they knew his visit was their last, best hope. Franny was the older one, Lucy the younger. Lucy's daughter, Beth, had been riding a trike in the driveway on Jesse's last visit, but now she wore skintight jeans and a jewelled tiara that seemed to be a fashion choice, not a costume. Jesse felt Nick snap to attention when Beth entered the room, as if a charmed snake had risen from its basket inside him.

They went single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the sisters' basement recording studio. Their father had built it for them years ago. It was tiny, with orange shag covering the floor, ceiling and walls. Jesse took the only seat, noting with approval a cowbell by the keyboard.

'Coffee?' Rachel asked him. Franny led her upstairs to make it. Lucy sat at the keyboard teasing out melodies. Beth took up a set of bongo drums and began loosely accompanying her mother. She handed Nick a tambourine, and, to Jesse's astonishment, his son settled in beating the thing in perfect time. Nice, he thought. Very nice. The day had swerved unexpectedly into good. The almost-teenage daughter wasn't a problem, he decided; she could join the group as a younger sister or a cousin, strengthen the tween angle. Maybe Nick could be part of it, too, although he and Beth would have to switch instruments. A boy on a tambourine…

Rachel bought his coffee, and Jesse took out his red enamelled box and dropped in a pinch of flakes. As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky. Jesus, he felt good. He'd been delegating too much. Hearing the music get _made_, that was the thing: people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive. The sisters were at the keyboard arranging their music, and Jesse experienced a bump of anticipation; something was going to happen here. He knew it. Felt it pricking his arms and chest.

'You've got Pro Tools on there, right?' he asked, indicating the laptop on a table amid the instruments. 'Is everything miked? Can we lay down some tracks right now?'

The sisters nodded and checked the laptop; they were ready to record. 'Vocals, too?' Franny asked.

'Absolutely,' Jesse said. 'Let's do it all at once. Let's blow the roof off your fucking house.'

Rachel was standing to Jesse's right. So many bodies had heated up the little room, lifting off her skin a perfume she'd been wearing for years – or was it a lotion? – that smelled like apricots; not just the sweet part but that slight bitterness around the pit. And as Jesse breathed in Rachel's lotion smell, his prick aroused itself suddenly like an old hound getting a swift kick. He almost jumped out of his seat in amazement, but he kept his cool. Don't push things, just let it happen. Don't scare it away.

Then the sisters began to sing. Oh, the raw, almost threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of instruments – these sensations met with a faculty deeper in Jesse than judgement or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy. And here was his first erection in months – prompted by Rachel, who had been too near Jesse all these years for him to really _see_ her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he'd read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them. He seized the cowbell and stick and began whacking at it with zealous blows. He felt the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribs – or was that his own pulse? He was on fire!

And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail he'd been inadvertently coped on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a 'hairball'. God, what a feeling of liquid shame had pooled in Jesse when he'd read that word. He hadn't been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he clogged people's throats and made them gag, the way Tina's cat would occasionally vomit hair onto the carpet? Jesse had gone for a haircut that very day and seriously considered having his back and upper arms waxed, until Tina talked him out of it, running her cool hands over his shoulders that night in bed, telling him she loved him, hairy or not – that the last thing the world needed was another waxed guy.

Music. Jesse was listening to music. The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Jesse tried to find again that deep contentment he'd felt just a minute ago. But 'hairball' had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. Jesse set down his cowbell and slipped the parking ticket from his pocket. He scribbled _hairball_ in hopes of exorcising the memory. He took a slow inhale and rested his eyes on Nick, who was flailing the tambourine trying to match the sisters' erratic tempo, and right away it happened again: taking his son for a haircut a couple of years ago, having his longtime barber, Rod, put down his scissors and pull Jesse aside. 'There's a problem with your son's hair,' he'd said.

'A problem!'

Rod walked Jesse over to Nick in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Jesse felt himself grow faint. 'Lice,' the barber whispered. 'They get it at school.'

'But he goes to private school!' Jesse had blurted. 'In Crandale, New York!'

Nick's eyes had gone wide with fear: 'What is it, Daddy?'

Other people were staring, and Jesse had felt responsible, with his own riotous head of hair, to the point where he sprayed OFF! In his armpits every morning to this day, and kept an extra can at the office – crazy! He knew it! Getting their coats while everyone watched, Jesse with a burning face; God, it hurt him to think of this now – hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands. He wanted to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go, but he concentrated on Rachel, just to his right, her sweet-bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl he'd chased at a party when he first came to New York and was selling vinyl on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, some delicious blond – Holly, was it? in the course of keeping tabs on Holly, Jesse had done several lines of coke and had been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels. He'd been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Jesse's brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Holly, staring down at him. There'd been a horrible, bottomless instant when their eyes met; then she'd shut the door.

Jesse had left the party with someone else – there was always someone else – and their night of fun, which he felt comfortable presuming, had erased the confrontation with Holly. But now it was back – oh, it was back, bringing waves of shame so immense they seemed to engulf whole parts of Jesse's life and drag them away: achievements, successes, moments of pride, all of it razed to the point when there was nothing – _he_ was nothing – a guy on a john looking up at the nauseated face of a woman he'd wanted to impress.

Jesse leaped from his stool, squashing the cowbell under one foot. Sweat stung his eyes. His hair engaged palpably with the ceiling shag.

'You okay?' Rachel asked, alarmed.

'I'm sorry,' Jesse panted, mopping his brow. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 'I'm sorry.'

Back upstairs, he stood outside the front door, pulling fresh air into his lungs. The Stop/Go sisters and daughter clustered around him, apologising for the airlessness of the recording studio, their father's ongoing failure to vent it properly, reminding one another in spirited tones of the many times they themselves had grown faint, trying to work there.

'We can hum the tunes,' Lucy said, and they did, in harmony, Beth, too, all of them standing not fair from Jesse's face, desperation quivering in their smiles. A grey cat made a figure eight around Jesse's shins, nudging him rapturously with its bony head. It was a relief to get back in the car.

He was driving Rachel to the city, but he had to get Nick home first. His son hunched in the back seat, facing the open window. It seemed to Jesse that his lark of an idea for the afternoon had gone awry. He fended off the longing to look at Rachel's breasts, waiting to calm down, regain his equilibrium before putting himself to the test. Finally, at a red light, he glanced slowly, casually, in her direction, not even focusing at first, then peering intently. Nothing. He was clobbered by a loss so severe that it took physical effort not to howl. He'd had it, _he'd had it!_ But where had it gone?

'Dad, green light,' Nick said.

Driving again, Jesse forced himself to ask his son, 'So, Nick. What did you think?'

The kid didn't answer. Maybe he was pretending not to hear, or maybe the wind was too loud in his face. Jesse glanced at Rachel. 'What about you?'

'Oh,' she said, 'they're awful.'

Jesse blinked, stung. He felt a gust of anger at Rachel that passed a few seconds later, leaving odd relief. Of course. They were awful. That was the problem.

'Unlistenable,' Rachel went on. 'No wonder you were having a heart attack.'

'I don't get it,' Jesse said.

'What?'

'Two years ago they sounded…different.'

Rachel gave him a quizzical look. 'It wasn't two years,' she said. 'It was five.'

'Why so sure?'

'Because last time, I came to their house right after a meeting at Windows on the World.'

It took Jesse a minute to comprehend this. 'Oh,' he finally said. 'How close to – '

'Four days.'

'Wow. I never knew that.' He waited out a respectful pause, then continued, 'Still, two years, five years – '

Rachel turned and stared at him. She looked angry. 'Who am I talking to?' she asked. 'You're Jesse St James! This is the music business. "Five years is five_ hundred_ years" – your words.'

Jesse didn't answer. They were approaching his former house, as he thought of it. He couldn't say 'old house', but he also couldn't say 'his house' anymore, although he'd certainly paid for it. His former house was withdrawn from the street on a grassy slope, a gleaming white Colonial that had filled him with awe every time he'd taken a key from his pocket to open the front door. Jesse stopped at the curb and killed the engine. He couldn't bring himself to drive up the driveway.

Nick was leaning forward from the back seat, his head between Jesse and Rachel. Jesse wasn't sure how long he'd been there. 'I think you need some of your medicine, Dad,' he said.

'Good idea,' Jesse said. He began tapping his pockets, but the little red box was nowhere to be found.

'Here, I've got it,' Rachel said. 'You dropped it coming out of the recording room.'

She was doing that more and more, finding things he'd misplaced – sometimes before Jesse even knew they were missing. It added to the almost trancelike dependence he felt on her. 'Thanks, Rach,' he said.

He opened the box. God the flakes were shiny. Gold didn't tarnish, that was the thing. The flakes would look the same in five years as they did right now.

'Should I put some on my tongue, like you did?' he asked his son.

'Yeah. But I get some too.'

'Rachel, you want to try a little medicine?' Jesse asked.

'Um, okay,' she said. 'What's it supposed to do?'

'Solve your problems,' Jesse said. 'I mean, headaches. Not that you have any.'

'Never,' Rachel said, with that same wary smile.

They each took a pinch of gold flakes and placed them on their tongues. Jesse tried not to calculate the dollar value of what was inside their mouths. He concentrated on the taste: Was it metallic, or was that just his expectation? Coffee, or was that what was left in his mouth? He tongued to the gold in a tight knot and sucked the juice from within it; sour, he thought. Bitter. Sweet? Each on seemed true for a second, but in the end Jesse had an impression of something mineral, like stone. Even earth. And then the lump melted away.

'I should go, Dad,' Nick said. Jesse let him out of the car and hugged him hard. As always, Nick went still in his embrace, but whether he was savouring it or enduring it Jesse could never tell.

He drew back and looked at his son. The baby he and Tina had nuzzled and kissed – now this painful, mysterious present. Jesse was tempted to say, _Don't tell your mother about the medicine_, craving an instant of connection with Nick before he went inside. But he hesitated, employing a mental calculation Dr Hummel had taught him: Did he really think the kid would tell Tina about the god? No. and that was his alert: Betrayal Bonding. Jesse said nothing.

He got back in the car, but didn't turn the key. He was watching Nick scale the undulating lawn toward his former house. The grass was fluorescently bright. His son seemed to buckle under his enormous backpack. What the hell was in it? Jesse had seen professional photographers carry less. As Nick neared the house he blurred a little, or maybe it was Jesse's eyes watering. He found it excruciating, watching his son's long journey to the front door. He worried Rachel would speak – say something like _He's a great kid_, or _That was fun_ – something that would require Jesse to turn and look at her. But Rachel knew better; she knew everything. She sat with Jesse in silence, watching Nick climb the fat, bright grass to the front door, then open it without turning and go inside.

They didn't speak again until they'd passed from the Henry Hudson Parkway onto the West Side Highway, heading into Lower Manhattan. Jesse played some early Who, the Stooges, bands he'd listened to before he was even old enough to go to a concert. Then he got into Flipper, the Mutants, Eye Protection – seventies Bay Area groups he and his gang had slam-danced to at the Mabuhay Gardens when they weren't practicing with their own unlistenable band, the Flaming Dildos. He sensed Rachel playing attention and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionment – his _hatred_ for the industry he'd given his life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselves – Patti Smith's ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down, down, down to the singles he'd just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting through the blue twilight.

'It's incredible', Rachel said, 'how there's just nothing there.'

Astounded, Jesse turned to her. Was it possible that she'd followed his musical rant to its grim conclusion? Rachel was looking downtown, and he followed her eyes to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been. 'There should be _something_, you know?' she said, not looking at Jesse. 'Like an echo. Or an outline.'

Jesse sighed. 'They'll put something up,' he said. 'When they're finally done squabbling.'

'I know.' But she kept looking south, as if it were a problem her mind couldn't solve.

Jesse was relieved she hadn't understood. He remembered his mentor, Cooper Anderson, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Cooper's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Cooper always had, his car collection out front, and Jesse had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, _You're finished_. Nostalgia was the end – everyone knew that. Cooper had died three months ago, after being paralysed from a stroke.

At a stoplight, Jesse remembered his list. He took out the parking ticket and finished it off.

'What do you keep scribbling on that ticket?' Rachel asked. Jesse handed it to her, his reluctance to have the list seen by human eyes overwhelming him a half-second too late. To his horror, she began reading it aloud:

'Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.'

Jesse listened in agony, as if the words themselves might provoke a catastrophe. But they were neutralised the instant Rachel spoke them in her scratchy voice. 'Not bad,' she said. 'They're titles, right?'

'Sure,' Jesse said. 'Can you read them one more time?'

She did, and now they sounded like titles to him, too. He felt peaceful, cleansed.

'I think "Kissing Mother Superior" is my favourite,' Rachel said. 'We've gotta find a way to use that one.'

They'd pulled up outside her building on Forsyth. The street felt desolate and underlit. Jesse wished she could live in a better place. Rachel gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which she'd managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper he'd needed for the past twelve years. Jesse seized her thin, tan hand. 'Listen,' he said. 'Listen, Rachel.'

She looked up. Jesse felt no lust at all – he wasn't even hard. What he felt for Rachel was love, a safety and closeness like what he'd had with Tina before he'd let her down so many times that she couldn't stop being mad. 'I'm crazy for you, Rachel,' he said. 'Crazy.'

'Come on, Jess,' Rachel chided lightly. 'None of that.'

He held her hand between the both of his. Rachel's fingers were trembly and cold. Her other hand was on the door.

'Wait,' Jesse said. 'Please.'

She turned to him, somber now. 'There's no way, Jesse,' she said. 'We need each other.'

The looked at one another in the failing light. The delicate bones of Rachel's face were lightly freckled – it was a girl's face, but she'd stopped being a girl when he wasn't watching.

Rachel leaned over and kissed Jesse's cheek: a chaste kiss, a kiss between brother and sister, mother and son, but Jesse felt the softness of her skin, the warm movement of her breath. Then she was out of the car. She waved to him through the window and said something he didn't catch. Jesse lunged across the empty seat, his face near the glass, staring fixedly as she said it again. Still, he missed it. as he struggled to open the door, Rachel said it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly:

'See. You. Tomorrow.'

_**What did you think? Next time we see how Jesse arrived where he is now, and we meet his friends. REVIEW!**_


	3. Ask Me if I Care

**__****Ok so here's another one...yes I have been super bored today! This is my favourite chapter so far, I think. PLEASE REVIEW!**

**__****MAKE SURE YOU ALREADY READ CHAPTER 2, I'VE UPDATED TWICE TODAY!**

**__****DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, nor do I own A Visit from the Goon Squad, unfortunatley...**

**Chapter Three: Ask Me if I Care**

Late at night, when there's nowhere left to go, we go to April's house. Puck drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Puck crests the hills. Still, if it's Jesse and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

The first time we go to Sea Cliff, where April lives, she points up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and says that her old school is up there: an all-girls school that her little sisters go to now. K through six, you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Puck goes, Can we see them? and April goes, My uniforms? but Puck goes, No, your alleged sisters.

April leads the way upstairs, Puck and Jesse right behind her. They're both fascinated by April, but it's Jesse who entirely loves her. And April loves Puck, of course.

Jesse's shoes are off, and I watch his heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick that it muffles every trace of us. Santana and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes she's smoked. I can't smell the gin we drank at the beginning of the night, taking it from my dad's hidden supply and pouring it into Coke cans so that we could drink it on the street.

Santana goes, Watch, Brittany. They'll be blond like her, the sisters.

I go, According to?

Rich children are always blond, Santana goes. It has to do with vitamins.

Believe me, I don't mistake that for information. I know everyone that Santana knows.

The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Jesse hangs back, too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. April's little sisters are sleeping on their sides, the covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like April, with pale wavy hair; the other is dark, like Santana. I'm afraid that they'll wake up and be scared of us, in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think, We shouldn't be here. Puck shouldn't have asked to come in. April shouldn't have said yes, but she says yes to everything that Puck asks. I think, I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.

Ahem, I whisper to Santana as we're leaving the room. Dark hair.

She whispers back, Black sheep.

1980 is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old. They blew their brains on acid, and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are as thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. It's not a pit, in the strictly speaking sense; it's a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last year's Pitters, who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there. I'm nervous walking in unless Santana is already there, or (for her) I am. We stand in for each other.

On warm days, Puck plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Puck actually built this instrument—bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around; there's no way not to when Puck plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up to listen, all of them looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didn't know how they'd got there. Puck is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.

The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Puck and Jesse change the name, Puck sprays black paint over his guitar case and Jesse's bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We don't know how Jesse and Puck decide if they're going to keep a name, because they don't actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through ESP. Santana and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Jesse and Puck. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we don't like being onstage.

Jesse transferred here last year from a high school in Daly City. We don't know where he lives, but some days we visit him after school at Green Apple Records, on Clement, where he works. If April comes with us, Jesse will take his break and share a pork bun in the Chinese bakery next door, while the fog gallops past the windows. Jesse has lightly tanned skin and excellent eyes, and his hair is a mass of toffee chestnut curls. He's usually looking at Alice, so I can watch Jesse as much as I want.

Down the path from the Pit is where the Cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Santana in Spanish, and she smiles at them but never answers. I ask her why. Santana goes, Not all Cholos are friends.

Santana knows that I'm waiting for Jesse. But Jesse is waiting for April, who's waiting for Puck, who's waiting for Santana, who's known Puck the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Puck is magnetic (with tanned, golden brown skin, hair that he irons into a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin LP, and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when it's sunny out), his mother killed herself three years ago with sleeping pills. Puck's been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.

Santana loves Puck back, but she isn't_ in love_ with him. Santana is waiting for Cooper, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Cooper lives in LA, but he said he would call her the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.

No one is waiting for me. Usually the girl in a story that no one is waiting for is fat, but my problem is more rare: I'm too sweet. I look like someone threw handfuls of sugar spun cotton candy at my face. I have freckles, for crying out loud. When I was little, my mom told me that my freckles were special. Thank God I'll be able to remove them, when I'm old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time, I have to make do. I have piercings, purple lips, and my green rinse, because how can anyone call me 'the sweet girl with freckles' when my hair is green?

Santana has choppy black hair, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a needle, not using ice. She has a beautiful, Latin face, with black eyes. It makes a difference.

Santana and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. She's seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow—it was her dad, who was on a 'business trip,' back before he moved away. So I still can't believe that I missed the day she met Cooper. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment that he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a baggie of cocaine dropped out. Cooper did some lines off Santana's bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Santana repeat every detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so that we could be equal again.

Cooper is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.

The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Puck's garage. When Santana and I get there, April is setting up the new tape recorder that her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. She's one of those girls who likes machines—another reason for Jesse to love her.

Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Puck lets the garage door slam down we're suddenly enraged, all of us. Pretty soon we're screaming out the songs, which have titles like 'Pet Rock' and 'Do the Math' and 'Pass Me the Kool-Aid,' but when we holler them in Puck's garage the lyrics might as well be _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck._ Every once in a while a kid from band or orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out with us (invited by Jesse). Today we audition a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when there's another bang on the garage door and Puck ropes it up. A pale, pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is there, sat in a wheelchair, holding a violin case. He goes, I'm looking for Jesse St James?

Santana and April and I stare at one another in shock, and it feels for a second like we're all three friends, like April is part of 'us.'

'Hey, man,' Jesse says. 'Perfect timing. Everybody, this is Artie.'

Artie plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, 'What the Fuck?':

_**You said you were a fairy princess  
You said you were a shooting star  
You said we'd go to Bora-Bora  
Now look at where the fuck we are.  
**_  
Bora-Bora was April's idea—we'd never heard of it. While everyone roars the chorus (_**'What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?'**_), Puck throws back his head, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. I watch Jesse listen, his eyes closed. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. 'I hope you got that, April,' he goes, and she rewinds the tape to make sure.

April takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Jesse and Puck drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, where all the punk bands play. We go there every Saturday night, after practice. We've heard the Dead Kennedys there, and Eye Protection, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. The bar is expensive, so we drink from my dad's supply ahead of time. Santana needs to drink more than me to get buzzed, and when she feels the booze hit she takes a long breath, like she's finally herself again.

In the Mab's graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop and find out how someon fell off the stage at a gig, how the guy from Target Video, is making an entire movie of punk rock, how two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this takes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks' sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Jesse does less of this than the rest of us. I think he actually listens to the music.

One thing I've noticed: there are no real punk rockers with freckles. They don't exist.

One night, Santana answers her phone and it's Cooper going, Hello, Beautiful. He says he's been calling for days and days, but the phone just rings. Why not try calling at _night_? I ask when Santana repeats this.

That Saturday, after rehearsal, he goes out with Santana. The rest of us go to the Mab, then back to April's house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurt her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living-room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night, her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Santana whispered in my ear, Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.

Tonight, maybe because Santana isn't here, I ask April if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned the first time we came over. She looks surprised. Yeah, she goes. I do.

I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which I've never seen. It's smaller than her sisters' room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.

I go, I didn't know you were so into frogs, and April goes, How would you?

I haven't really been alone with April before. She seems not as nice as she is when Santana is around.

She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: one of the green plaid one-pieces she wore when she was little, a sailor-suit two-piece from later on. I go, Which did you like better?

Neither, she says. Who wants to wear a uniform?

I go, I would.

Is that a joke?

What kind of joke would it be?

The kind where you and Santana laugh about how you made a joke and I didn't get it.

My throat turns very dry. I go, I won't. Laugh with Santana.

April shrugs. Ask me if I care, she goes.

We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. April wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn't a real punk, either.

After a while I go, Why do your parents let us come here?

They're not my parents. They're my mother and stepfather.

Okay

They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.

The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like we're alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Santana was with us.

Are they right now? I ask, softly. Keeping an eye?

April takes a huge breath and lets it back out. No, she goes. They're asleep.

Artie the violinist isn't even in high school—he's a sophomore at S.F. State, where Santana and I and Puck (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Santana tells Jesse, The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.

I guess we'll find out, Jesse goes, and he looks at his watch like he's thinking. In two weeks and four days and six hours and I'm not sure how many minutes.

We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: the guy from the Mab gave him a call. Santana and I shriek and hug onto Jesse, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I can remember every hug I've given him. I learn something each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Puck even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I feel his heartbeat on my palm when I hold his back. Santana goes, Who else knows?

Puck, of course. April, too, but it's only later that this bothers us.

Later, Santana calls Cooper from our apartment, where the charge won't stand out on the phone bill. I'm two inches away from her on my parents' flowered bedspread as she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man's voice answer and it shocks me that he's real, that Santana didn't make him up, even though I never supposed that she had. He doesn't go, _Hey, Beautiful_, though. He goes, I told you to let me call you.

Santana goes, Sorry, in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, What kind of hello is that? Cooper goes, Who the Christ am I talking to? and I tell him, Brittany. Then he goes, in a calmer voice, Nice to meet you, Brittany. Now, would you hand the phone back to Santana?

This time she pulls the cord away. Cooper seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Santana hisses at me, You have to leave. Go!

I walk out of my parents' bedroom into our kitchen. There's a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for a science project. After a while, Santana comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.

Later she tells me that Cooper said yes: he'll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he'll give us a record contract. It's not a promise, he warned her. But we'll have a good time anyway, right, Beautiful? Don't we always?

The night of the concert, I go with Santana to meet Cooper for dinner at Vanessi's, a restaurant just down from the Mab, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited April, but Santana goes, Her parents probably take her to Vanessi's all the time. I go, You mean her mother and stepfather.

A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Cooper. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy chocolate hair and he's handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.

Cooper actually does say, C'mere, Beautiful and he lifts an arm to Santana. He's wearing a light-blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the table and fits right under his arm. Brittany, Cooper goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Santana, like I was just about to do, I end up on Cooper's other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And, like that, we're Cooper's girls.

A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi's and saw linguine with clams. All week long I've been planning to order that dish. Santana picks the same, and, after we order, Cooper hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies' room. It's a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There's a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Santana heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and closes her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I've got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we've done before now wasn't really coke. We sit down and tell Cooper about a new band we've heard of called Flipper, and Cooper tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn't completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so that people could jump off or on. I go, I want to see Africa! and Cooper goes, Maybe we'll go together, the three of us, and it seems like this really might happen. He tells us, The soil in the hills is so fertile it's red, and I go, My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil, and Santana goes, What about the mosquitoes? and Cooper goes, I've never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon. And I realize that I'm beginning my adult life right now, on this night.

When the waiter brings my linguine and clams I can't take one bite. Only Cooper eats: an almost raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He's one of those people who never stops moving. Three times people come to our table to say hello to him, but he doesn't introduce us.

Back on the street, he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people into the Casbah, the strippers lounging in the doorways of the Condor and Big Al's. Traffic pushes along, dust flying in the heat, people honking and waving from their cars like we're all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I'm a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.

The door guy at the Mab recognizes Cooper and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Nuns, who are playing later on. Inside, Jesse and Puck are onstage, setting up with April. Santana and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Cooper's already introducing himself to the band. Jesse shakes Cooper's hand and goes, It's an honor, sir.

The Flaming Dildos open with 'Snake in the Grass.' No one is dancing or even really listening; people are still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they're here for start playing. Normally Santana and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand back, leaning against a wall with Cooper. He's bought us both gin-and-tonics. I can't tell if the Dildos sound good or not. I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Cooper's face, he's grinding his teeth.

Artie comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he leans to replug it. I can't even look at Jesse.

When they start playing 'Do the Math,' Cooper yells in my ear, Whose idea was the violin?

I go, Jesse's.

Kid on bass?

I nod, and Cooper watches Jesse for a minute and I watch him, too. Cooper goes, Not much of a player.

But he's— I try to explain. The whole thing is his—

Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but, when it hits Puck's face, thank God it's only ice from a drink. Puck flinches but keeps on playing, and then a Budweiser can flies up and clips Artie right in the forehead. Santana and I look at each other, panicked, but when we try to move, Cooper anchors us. The Dildos start playing 'What the Fuck?' but now garbage is spewing at the stage, chucked by four guys with safety-pin chains connecting their nostrils to their earlobes. Every few seconds another drink strikes Puck's face. Finally he just plays with his eyes shut. Suddenly people are slam-dancing _hard_, the kind of dancing that's basically fighting. April clobbers her drums as Puck tears off his dripping T-shirt and snaps it at one of the garbage throwers, hitting him right in the face with a twangy crack—_snrack_—like my brothers snapping bath towels, but sharper. The Puck magnet is starting to work—people are watching his bare muscles shining with sweat and beer. Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Puck kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boot—there's a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Puck's smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, wolf teeth flashing, and I realize that, of all of us, Puck is the truly angry one.

I turn to Santana, but she's gone. Maybe my thousand eyes are what tell me to look down. I see Cooper's fingers spread out over her black hair. She's kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one can see them. Maybe no one does. Cooper's other arm is still around me, which I guess is why I don't run, although I could. I stand there while Cooper mashes Santana's head against himself again and again until I don't know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she's not even Santana but some kind of animal or machine that can't be broken. I force myself to look at the band, Puck snapping the wet shirt and knocking people with his boot. Cooper is grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head into my neck, and letting out a hot, stuttering groan that I can hear even through the music. He's that close. A sob cracks open in me. Tears leak out from my eyes, but only from the two in my face. The other thousand eyes are closed.

The walls of Cooper's apartment are covered with electric guitars and gold and silver LPs, just like Santana said. But she never mentioned that it was on the thirty-fifth floor, six blocks away from the Mab. She didn't even tell about the green marble slabs in the elevator. I think that was a lot to leave out.

In the kitchen, Santana pours Fritos into a dish and takes a glass bowl of green apples out of the refrigerator. She's already passed around quaaludes, offering one to every person except me. I think she's afraid to look at me. _Who's the hostess now_? I want to ask.

In the living room, April sits with Puck, who is wearing a Pendleton shirt from Cooper's closet and looks pale and shaky, maybe from having stuff thrown at him, maybe because he now understands for real that Santana has a boyfriend and that it isn't him and never will be. Artie is there, too; he's got a cut on his cheek and an almost black eye and he keeps saying, That was intense, to no one in particular. Everyone agrees that the gig went well.

When Cooper leads Jesse up a spiral staircase to his recording studio, I tag along. He calls Jesse 'kiddo' and explains each machine in the room, which is small and warm, with black foam points all over the walls. Cooper's legs move restlessly and he eats a green apple with loud cracking noises, like he's gnawing rock. Jesse glances out the door toward the rail overlooking the living room, trying to get a glimpse of April. I keep being about to cry. I'm worried that what happened in the club counts as having sex with Cooper—that I was part of it.

Finally I go back downstairs. Off the living room I notice a door partly open, a big bed just beyond. I go in and lie face down on a velvet bedspread. A peppery incense smell trickles around me. The room is cool and dim, with photographs in frames on both sides of the bed. My whole body hurts. After a few minutes someone else comes in and lies down next to me, and I know it's Santana. We don't say anything—we just lie there side by side in the dark. Finally I go, You should've told me. Told you what? she goes, but I don't even know. Then she goes, There's too much, and I feel like something is ending, right at that minute.

After a while Santana turns on a lamp by the bed. Look, she goes. She's holding a framed picture of Cooper in a swimming pool surrounded by kids, the two littlest ones almost babies. I count six. Santana goes, They're his _children_. That blond girl, she's almost twenty.

I lean close to the picture. Cooper looks so happy, surrounded by his kids like any normal dad, that I can't believe that the Cooper with us is the same man. He comes into the bedroom a minute later, rock-crunching another apple. I realize that the bowl of green apples is only for Cooper—he eats them non-stop. I slide off the bed without looking at him, and he shuts the door behind me.

It takes me a second to get what's going on in the living room. Puck is sitting cross-legged, picking at a gold guitar in the shape of a flame. April is behind him with her arms around his neck, her face next to his, her hair falling into his lap. Her eyes are closed with joy. I forget who I actually am for a second—all I can think is how Jesse will feel when he sees this. I look around for him, but there's just Artie peering at the albums on the wall, trying to be inconspicuous. And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once—the couch, the walls, even the floor—and I know Jesse's alone in Cooper's studio, pouring music around us. A minute ago it was 'Don't Let Me Down.' Then it was Blondie's 'Heart of Glass.' Now it's Iggy Pop's 'The Passenger:

_**I am the passenger  
And I ride and I ride  
I ride through the city's backsides  
I see the stars come out of the sky. **_

Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

I notice Artie looking over at me kind of hesitantly, and I see how this is supposed to work: I'm the dog, so I get Artie. I slide open a glass door and step out onto Cooper's balcony. I've never seen San Francisco from so high up: it's a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat, dark bay. There's a mean wind, so I go in for my jacket then come back out and curl up tight on a white plastic chair. I stare at the view until I start to feel calmer. I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

After a while the door slides open. I don't look up, thinking it's Artie, but it turns out to be Cooper. He's barefoot, wearing shorts. His legs are tanned, even in the dark. I go, Where's Santana?

Asleep, he says. He's standing at the railing, looking out. It's the first time I've seen him be still.

I go, Do you even remember being our age?

Cooper grins at me in my chair, but it's a copy, of the grin he had at dinner. I _am_ your age, he goes.

Ahem, I go. You have six kids.

So I do, he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn't have sex with this man. I don't even know him. Then he says, I'll never get old.

You're already old, I tell him.

He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. You're scary, he goes. You know that?

It's the freckles, I go.

It's not the freckles, it's _you_. He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, I like it.

Do not.

I do. You're gonna keep me honest, Brittany.

I'm surprised he remembers my name. I go, It's too late for that, Cooper.

Now he laughs, really laughs, and I understand that we're friends, Cooper and I. Even if I hate him, which I do. I get out of my chair and walk to the railing, where he is.

People will try to change you, Brittany, Cooper goes. Don't let them.

But I want to change.

Don't, he goes, serious. You're beautiful. Stay like this.

But the freckles, I go, and my throat gets that ache.

The freckles are the best part, Cooper says. Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. He's going to kiss them one by one.

I start to cry. I don't even hide it.

Hey, Cooper goes. He leans down so our faces are together and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, The world is full of shitheads, Brittany. Don't listen to them—listen to me.

And I know that Cooper is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Two weeks later, Santana runs away. I find out at the same time as everyone else.

Her mother comes straight to our apartment. She and my parents sit me down: What do I know? Who is this new boyfriend? I tell them, Cooper. He lives in LA and has six children. He knows Bill Graham personally. I think that Jesse might know who Cooper actually is, so Santana's mom comes to our school to talk to Jesse St James. But he's hard to find. Now that April and Puck are together, Jesse has stopped coming to the Pit. Before, he and Puck didn't talk because they were like one person. Now it's like they've never met.

I can't stop wondering: if I'd pulled away from Cooper and fought the garbage throwers, would Jesse have settled for me the way Puck settled for April? Could that one thing have made all the difference?

They track down Cooper in a matter of days. He tells Santana's mom that she hitchhiked all the way to his house without even warning him. He says that she's safe, he's taking care of her, it's better than having her on the street. He promises to bring her home when he comes to the city the next week. Why not this week? I wonder.

While I'm waiting for Santana, April invites me over. We take the bus from school, a long ride to Sea Cliff. Her house looks smaller in daylight. In the kitchen, we mix honey with her mother's homemade yogurts and eat two each. We go up to her room, where all the frogs are, and sit on her built-in window seat. April tells me that she's planning to get real frogs and keep them in a terrarium. She's calm and happy now that Puck loves her. I can't tell if she's real, or if she's just stopped caring whether she's real or not. Or is not caring what _makes_ a person real?

I wonder if Cooper's house is near the ocean. Does Santana look at the waves? Do they ever leave Cooper's bedroom? Are his children there? I keep getting lost in these questions.

Then I hear giggling, pounding from somewhere. I go, Who's that?

My sisters, April goes. They're playing tetherball.

We head downstairs and outside, into April's back yard, where I've been only in the dark. It's sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it. At the edge of the yard, two little girls are slapping a bright-yellow ball around a silver pole. They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms.

_**Make sure you REVIEW!**_

_**Next chapter, we find out some more about Cooper...**_


	4. Safari

_**Please review this, the story is now over 25,000 words and there's only one review. Kinda annoying, especially when I keep getting emails telling me how many of you are subscribed/favourited. so read, enjoy, and REVIEW!**_

**Chapter Four: Safari**

**I. Grass**

'Remember, Stacy? In Hawaii? When we went to the beach at night and it started to rain?' Stevie is talking to his older sister, Stacy, who despises her name. But because they're crouched around a bonfire with the other people on the safari, and because Stevie doesn't speak up all that often, and because their father, Cooper, sitting behind them on a camp chair, is a record producer whose personal life is of general interest, those near enough to hear are listening closely. 'Remember? How Mom and Dad stayed at the table for one more drink—'

'Impossible,' their father interjects, with a wink at the elderly bird-watching ladies to his left. Both women wear their binoculars even in the dark, as if hoping to spot birds in the firelit tree overhead.

'Remember, Stacy? How the beach was still warm, and that crazy wind was blowing?'

But Stacy is focused on her father's legs, which have intertwined behind her with those of his girlfriend, Shelby. Soon Cooper and Shelby will bid the group good night and retreat to their tent, where they'll make love on one of its narrow rickety cots, or possibly on the ground. From the adjacent tent, which she and Stevie share, Stacy, who is fourteen, can hear them—not sounds, exactly, but movement. Stevie, at eleven, is too young to notice.

Stacy throws back her head, startling her father. Cooper is in his late thirties, his square-jawed surfer's face gone a little draggy under the eyes. 'You were married to Mom on that trip,' she informs him, her voice distorted by the arching of her neck, which is encircled by a puka-shell choker.

'Yes, Stacy,' Cooper says. "I'm aware of that."

The bird-watching ladies trade a sad smile. Cooper is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him: two failed marriages and two more kids back home in LA, who were too young to bring on this three-week safari. The safari is a new business venture of Cooper's old Army buddy Brett, with whom he drank and misbehaved, having barely avoided Korea almost twenty years ago.

Stevie pulls at his sister's shoulder. He wants her to remember, to feel it all again: the wind, the endless black ocean, the two of them peering into the dark as if awaiting a signal from their distant, grownup lives. 'Remember, Stacy?'

'Yeah,' Stacy says, narrowing her eyes. 'I do remember that.'

The Samburu warriors have arrived—four of them, two holding drums, and a child in the shadows minding a yellow long-horned cow. They came yesterday, too, after the morning game run, when Cooper and Shelby were 'napping'. That was when Stacy exchanged shy glances with the most beautiful warrior, who has scar-tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.

Stacy stands up and moves closer to the warriors: a slender girl in shorts and a raw-cotton shirt with small round buttons made of wood. Her teeth are slightly crooked. When the drummers pat their drums, Stacy's warrior and the other one begin to sing: guttural noises pried from their abdomens. She sways in front of them. During her ten days in Africa, she has begun to act differently—like one of the girls who intimidate her back home. In a cinder-block town that the group visited a few days ago, she drank a muddy-looking concoction in a bar and wound up trading away her silver butterfly earrings (a birthday gift from her father) in a hut belonging to a very young woman whose breasts were leaking milk. She was late returning to the jeeps; Joe, who works for Brett, had to go and find her. 'Prepare yourself,' he warned. 'Your dad is having kittens.' Stacy didn't care then, and doesn't now; there's a charge for her in simply commanding the fickle beam of her father's attention, feeling his disquiet as she dances, alone, by the fire.

Cooper lets go of Shelby's hand and sits up straight. He has an urge to grab his daughter's skinny arm and yank her away from the warriors, but does no such thing, of course. That would be letting her win.

The warrior smiles at Stacy. He's nineteen, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he has sung for enough American tourists to recognize that, in her world, Stacy is a child.

Thirty five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He'll have four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, on of whom, a boy named Matt, will inherit his _lalema_: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Matt will go to college at NYU and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). He'll marry an American named Harmony and remain in New York, where he'll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Harmony will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather's hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglass, directly under a skylight.

'Son,' Cooper says, into Stevie's ear, 'let's take a walk.'

The boy rises from the dust and walks with his father away from the fire. Twelve tents, each sleeping two safari guests, form a circle around it, along with three outhouses and a shower stall, where water warmed on the fire is released from a sack with a rope pull. Out of view are some smaller tents for the staff, and then the black, muttering expanse of the bush, where they've been cautioned never to go.

'Your sister's acting nuts,' Cooper says, striding into the dark.

'Why?' Stevie asks. He hasn't noticed anything nutty in Stacy's behavior. But his father hears the question differently.

'Women are crazy,' he says. 'You could spend a goddam lifetime trying to figure out why.'

'Mom's not.'

'True,' Cooper reflects, calmer now. 'In fact, your mother's not crazy enough.'

The singing and drumbeats fall suddenly away, leaving Cooper and Stevie alone under a sharp moon.

'What about Mindy?' Stevie asks. 'Is she crazy?'

'Good question,' Cooper says. 'What do you think?'

'She likes to read. She brought a lot of books.'

'Did she?'

'I like her,' Stevie says. 'But I don't know if she's crazy. Or what the right amount is.'

Cooper puts his arm around Stevie. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world who has the power to soothe him. And that, although he expects Stevie to resemble him, what he most enjoys in his son is the many ways in which he is different: quiet, reflective, attuned to the natural world and the pain of others.

'Who cares,' Cooper says. 'Right?'

'Right,' Stevie says, and the women fall away like the drumbeats, leaving him and his father together, an invincible unit. At eleven years old, Stevie knows two clear things about himself: he belongs to his father. And his father belongs to him.

They stand still, surrounded by the whispering bush. The sky is crammed with stars. Stevie closes his eyes and opens them again. He is in Africa with his father. He thinks, I'll remember this night for the rest of my life. And he's right.

When they finally return to camp, the warriors have gone. Only a few diehards from the Phoenix faction (as Cooper calls the safari members who hail from there) are still sitting by the fire, comparing the day's animal sightings. Stevie creeps into his tent, pulls off his pants, and climbs onto his cot in a T-shirt and underwear. He assumes that Stacy is asleep. When she speaks, he can hear in her voice that she's been crying.

'Where did you go?' she says.

**II. Hills**

'What on earth have you got in that backpack?'

It's Sue, Cooper's travel agent. She hates Shelby, but Shelby doesn't take it personally—it's structural hatred, a term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend of a powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.

'Anthropology books,' Shelby tells Sue. 'I'm in the PhD program at Berkeley.'

'Why don't you read them?'

'Carsick,' Shelby says, which is plausible, God knows, in the shuddering jeeps, though untrue. She isn't sure why she hasn't cracked her Boas or Malinowski or Julian Jaynes, but assumes that she must be acquiring knowledge in other ways that will prove equally fruitful. In bold moments, fuelled by the boiled black coffee that is served each morning in the meal tent, Shelby has even wondered whether her insights on the links between social structure and emotional response amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss—a refinement, a contemporary application. She's only in her second year of coursework.

Their jeep is the last in a line of five, nosing along a dirt road through grassland whose apparent brown masks a wide internal spectrum of color: purples, greens, reds. Joe, the surly man who is Brett's second-in-command, is driving. Shelby has managed to avoid Joe's jeep for several days, but he has developed a reputation for discovering the best animals, so although there's no game run today—they're relocating to the hills, where they'll spend the night in a hotel for the first time this trip—the children begged to ride with him. And keeping Cooper's children happy, or as close to happy as is structurally possible, is part of Shelby's job.

_Structural resentment:_ The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriend's presence, her own nascent sexuality being her chief weapon.

_Structural affection:_ A twice-divorced male's preadolescent son (and favorite child) will embrace and accept his father's new girlfriend because he hasn't yet learned to separate his father's loves and desires from his own. In a sense, he, too, will love and desire her, and she will feel maternal toward him, though she isn't old enough to be his mother.

Cooper opens the large aluminum case where his new camera is partitioned in its foam padding like a dismantled rifle. He uses the camera to stave off the boredom that afflicts him when he can't physically move around. He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally, he'll hand the device to Shelby, wanting her opinion, and each time the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums – hers alone – is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Cooper from some distant future.

_Structural incompatibility:_ A powerful twice-divorced male will be unable to acknowledge, much less sanction, the ambitions of a much younger female mate. By definition, their relationship will be temporary.

_Structural desire:_ The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mate's power.

Joe drives with one elbow out the window. He has been a largely silent presence on this safari, eating quickly in the meal tent, providing terse answers to people's questions ('Where do you live?' 'Mombasa.' 'How long have you been in Africa?' 'Eight years.' 'What brought you here?' 'This and that'). He rarely joins the group around the fire after dinner. On a trip to the outhouse one night, Shelby glimpsed him at the other fire, near the staff tents, drinking a beer and laughing with the Kikuyu drivers. With the tour group, he rarely smiles. Whenever his eyes happen to graze Shelby's, she senses that he feels shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Cooper; because she keeps telling herself that this trip constitutes anthropological research into group dynamics and ethnographic enclaves, when really what she's after is luxury, adventure, and a break from her four insomniac roommates.

Next to Joe, in the shotgun seat, Thad is ranting about animals. He's the bassist for the Mad Hatters, one of the groups that Cooper produces, and has come on the trip as Cooper's guest, along with the Hatters' guitarist and a girlfriend each. These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition. (_Structural fixation:_ A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy.) They challenge one another nightly over who saw more and at what range, invoking witnesses from their respective jeeps and promising definitive proof when they develop their film, back home.

Behind Joe sits Sue, the travel agent, and beside her, gazing out his window, is Finn, a young actor whose genius for stating the obvious—'It's hot,' or 'The sun is setting,' or 'There aren't many trees'—is a staple source of amusement for Shelby. Finn is starring in a movie whose soundtrack Cooper is helping to create; the presumption seems to be that its release will bring Finn immediate and stratospheric fame. In the seat behind him, Stevie and Stacy are showing their _Mad_ magazine to one of the bird-watching ladies. She or her companion can usually be found near Cooper, who flirts with them tirelessly and needles them to take him bird-watching. His indulgence of these women in their seventies (strangers to him before this trip) intrigues Shelby; she can find no structural reason for it.

In the last row, beside Shelby, Cooper thrusts his torso from the open roof, ignoring the rule to stay seated while the jeep is moving. Joe swerves suddenly, and Cooper is knocked back down, camera smacking his forehead. He swears at Joe, but the words are lost in the jeep's wobbly jostle through tall grass. After a minute or two of chaotic driving, they emerge a few feet from a pride of lions. Everyone gawks in startled silence—it's the closest they've been to any animal on this trip. The motor is still running, Joe's hand tentatively on the wheel, but the lions appear so relaxed, so indifferent, that he kills the engine. In the ticking motor silence they can hear the lions breathe: two females, one male, three cubs. The cubs and one of the females are gorging on a bloody zebra carcass. The others are dozing.

'They're eating,' Finn says.

Thad's hands shake as he spools film into his camera. 'Fuck,' he keeps muttering. 'Fuck.'

Joe lights a cigarette—forbidden in the brush—and waits, as indifferent to the scene as if he had paused outside a rest room.

'Can we stand?' the children ask. 'Is it safe?'

'I'm sure as hell going to,' Cooper says.

Cooper, Stacy, Stevie, Thad, and Finn all climb onto their seats and jam their upper halves through the open roof. Shelby is now effectively alone inside the jeep with Joe, Sue, and the birdwatchers, who peer at the lions through their bird-watching binoculars.

'How did you know?' Shelby asks, after a silence.

Joe swivels around to look at her down the length of the jeep. He has unruly, thick hair, in dreads, and soft brown eyes. There is a suggestion of humor in his face. 'Just a guess.'

'From half a mile away?'

'He probably has a sixth sense,' Sue says, 'after so many years here.'

Joe turns back around and blows smoke through his open window.

'Did you see something?' Shelby says, persisting.

She doesn't expect Joe to turn again, but he does, leaning over the back of his seat, his eyes meeting hers between the children's bare legs. Shelby feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. She understands now that it's mutual; she sees this in Joe's face.

'Broken bushes,' he says. 'Like something got chased. It could have been nothing.'

Sue, sensing her exclusion, sighs wearily. 'Can someone come down so I can look, too?' she calls to those above the roof.

'Coming,' Cooper says, but Thad is faster, ducking back into the front seat and then leaning out his window. Sue rises in her big print skirt. Shelby's face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Joe's, is on the jeep's left side, facing away from the lions. Shelby watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.

'You're driving me crazy,' Joe says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Shelby's, like one of those whispering tubes. 'You must know that.'

'I didn't,' she murmurs back.

'Well, you are.'

'My hands are tied.'

'Forever?'

She smiles. 'Please. An interlude.'

'Then?'

'Grad school. Berkeley.'

Joe chuckles. Shelby isn't sure what the chuckle means—is it funny that she's in graduate school, or that Berkeley and Mombasa, where he lives, are irreconcilable locations?

'Thad, you crazy fuck, get back in here.'

It's Cooper's voice, from overhead. But Shelby feels sluggish, almost drugged, and reacts only when she hears the change in Joe's voice. 'No,' he hisses. 'No! Back in the jeep.'

Thad is skulking among the lions, holding his camera close to the faces of the sleeping male and female, taking pictures.

'Walk backward,' Joe says, with hushed urgency. 'Backward, Thad, gently.'

Movement comes from a direction that no one is expecting: the lioness gnawing at the zebra. She vaults at Thad in an agile, gravity-defying spring that anyone with a house cat would recognize. She lands on his head, flattening him instantly. There are screams, a gunshot, and those overhead tumble back into their seats so violently that at first Shelby thinks they've been shot. But it's the lioness; Joe has killed her with a rifle he'd secreted somewhere, maybe under his seat. The other lions have scattered; all that's left is the zebra carcass and the body of the lioness, Thad's legs splayed beneath her.

Joe, Cooper, Finn, and Sue bolt from the jeep. Shelby starts to follow, but Cooper pushes her back, and she realizes that he wants her to stay with his children. She leans over the back of their seat and puts an arm around each of them. As they stare through the open windows, a wave of nausea rolls through Shelby; she feels in danger of passing out. It occurs to Shelby, vaguely, that the elderly bird-watchers were inside the jeep the whole time that she and Joe were talking.

'Is Thad dead?' Stevie asks flatly.

'I'm sure he's not,' Shelby says.

'Why isn't he moving?'

'The lion is on top of him. See, they're pulling her off. He's probably fine under there.'

'There's blood on the lion's mouth,' Stacy says.

'That's from the zebra. Remember, she was eating the zebra?' It takes enormous effort to keep her teeth from chattering, but Shelby knows that she must hide her terror from the children—her belief that whatever turns out to have happened is her fault.

By the time the group assembles in the bar of the mountain hotel after dinner, everyone seems to have gained something. Thad has won a blistering victory over his bandmate and both girlfriends, at the cost of thirty-two stitches on his left cheek that you could argue are also a gain (he's a rock star, after all) and several huge antibiotic pills administered by an English surgeon with hooded eyes and beery breath—an old friend of Joe's, whom he unearthed in a cinder-block town about an hour away from the lions.

Joe has gained the status of a hero, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. He gulps a bourbon and mutters his responses to the giddy queries of the Phoenix faction. No one has yet confronted him on the damning basics: Why were you in the bush? How did you get so close to the lions? Why didn't you stop Thad from getting out of the jeep? But Joe knows that Brett, his boss, will ask these questions, and that they will likely lead to his being fired: the latest in a series of failures brought on by what his mother, back in Minehead, calls his 'self-destructive tendencies.'

A gang of children, including Stevie, Stacy, a set of eight-year-old twin boys from Phoenix, and April, the skinny twelve-year-old, leave the bar and stampede along a slatted path to a blind beside a watering hole: a wooden hut full of long benches with a slot they can peek through, invisible to the animals. It's dark inside. They rush to the slot, but no animals are drinking at the moment.

'Did you actually see the lion?' April asks, with wonder.

'Lion_ess_,' Stevie says. 'There were two, plus a lion. And three cubs.'

'She means the one that got shot,' Stacy says, impatiently. 'Obviously we saw it. We were inches away!'

'Feet,' Stevie says, correcting her.

'Feet are _made_ out of inches,' Stacy says. 'We saw everything.'

Stevie has already started to hate these conversations—the panting excitement behind them, the way Stacy seems to revel in it. A thought has been troubling him. 'I wonder what will happen to the cubs,' he says. 'The lioness who got shot must have been their mom—she was eating with them.'

'Not necessarily,' Stacy says.

'But if she was.'

'Maybe the dad will take care of them,' Stevie says, doubtfully. The other children are quiet.

The members of Brett's safari have gained a story that they'll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: _What ever happened to…?_ In a few cases, they'll meet again to reminisce and marvel at one another's physical transformations, which will seem to melt away with the minutes. Finn, whose success will elude him until middle age, when he'll land the role of a paunchy, outspoken plumber in a popular sitcom, will meet for espresso with April, who will Google him after her divorce. Postcoffee, they'll repair to a Days Inn off San Vicente for some unexpectedly moving sex, then to Palm Springs for a golf weekend, and finally to the altar in Nebraska. But this outcome will be the stark exception – mostly, the reunions will lead to a mutual discovery that having been on safari thirty-five years before doesn't qualify as having much in common, and they'll part ways wondering what, exactly, they'd hoped for.

'I'm going back,' Stevie tells his sister.

He follows the path up to the hotel. His father and Shelby are still in the smoky bar; the strange, celebratory feeling unnerves Stevie. His mind bends again and again to the jeep, but his memories are a muddle: the lioness springing; a jerk of impact from the gun; Thad moaning during the drive to the doctor, blood collecting in an actual puddle under his head on the floor of the jeep, like in a comic book. All of it is suffused with the feel of Shelby holding him from behind, her cheek against his head, her smell: not bready, like his mom's, but salty, bitter almost—a smell that seems akin to that of the lions themselves.

He stands by his father, who pauses in the middle of an Army story he's telling with Brett. 'You tired, son?'

'Want me to walk you upstairs?' Shelby asks, and Stevie nods: he does want that.

The blue, mosquito-y night pushes in from the hotel windows. Outside the bar, Stevie is suddenly less tired. Shelby collects his key from the front desk, then says, 'Let's go out on the porch.'

They step outside. Dark as it is, the silhouettes of mountains against the sky are even darker. Stevie can dimly hear the voices of the other children, down in the blind. He's relieved to have escaped them. He stands with Shelby at the edge of the porch and looks at the mountains. Stevie senses her waiting for something and he waits, too, his heart stamping.

There is a cough farther down the porch. Stevie sees the orange tip of a cigarette move in the dark, and Joe comes toward them with a creak of boots. 'Hello there,' he says to Stevie. He doesn't speak to Shelby, and Stevie decides that the one hello must be for both of them.

'Hello,' he greets Joe.

'What are you up to?' Joe asks.

Stevie turns to Shelby. 'What are we up to?'

'Enjoying the night,' she says, still facing the mountains, but her voice is tense. 'We should go up,' she tells Stevie, and walks abruptly back inside. Stevie is troubled by her rudeness. 'Are you coming?' he asks Joe.

'Why not?'

As the three of them ascend the stairs, Stevie feels an odd pressure to make conversation. 'Is your room up here, too?' he asks.

'Down the hall,' Joe says. 'Room 3.'

Shelby unlocks the door to Stevie's room and steps in, leaving Joe in the hall. Stevie is suddenly angry with her.

'Want to see my room?' he asks Joe. 'Mine and Stacy's?'

Shelby emits a single syllable of laughter—the way his mother laughs when things have annoyed her to the point of absurdity. Joe steps into his room. It's plain, with wooden furniture and dusty flowered curtains, but after ten nights in tents it feels lavish.

'Very nice,' Joe says. Shelby crosses her arms and stares out the window. There is a feeling in the room that Stevie can't identify. He's angry with Shelby and thinks that Joe must be, too. _Women are crazy_. Shelby's body is slender and elastic; she could slip through a keyhole, or under a door. Her thin purple sweater rises and falls quickly as she breathes. Stevie is surprised by how angry he is.

Joe taps a cigarette from his pack, but doesn't light it. It is unfiltered, tobacco emerging from both ends. 'Well,' he says. 'Good night, you two.'

Stevie had imagined Shelby tucking him into bed, her arm around him as it was in the jeep. Now this seems out of the question. He can't change into his pajamas with Shelby there; he doesn't even want her to _see_ his pajamas, which have small blue elves all over them. 'I'm fine,' he tells her, hearing the coldness in his voice. 'You can go back.'

'OK,' she says. She turns down his bed, plumps the pillow, adjusts the open window. Stevie senses her finding reasons not to leave the room.

'Your dad and I will be just next door,' Shelby says. 'You know that, right?'

'Duh,' he mutters. Then, chastened, he says, 'I know.'

**III. Sand**

Five days later, they take a long, very old train overnight to Mombasa. Every few minutes, it slows down just enough for people to leap from the doors, bundles clutched to their chests, and for others to scramble on. Cooper's group and the Phoenix faction install themselves in the cramped bar car, which they share with African men in suits and bowler hats. Stacy is allowed to drink one beer, but she sneaks two more with the help of Finn, who stands beside her narrow barstool. 'You're sunburned,' he says, pressing a finger to Stacy's cheek. 'The African sun is strong.'

'True,' Stacy says, grinning as she swigs her beer. Now that Shelby has pointed out Finn's platitudes, Stacy finds him hilarious.

'You have to wear sunscreen,' he says.

'I know—I did.'

'Once isn't enough. You have to reapply.'

Stacy catches Shelby's eye and succumbs to giggles. Her father moves close. 'What's so funny?'

'Life,' Stacy says, leaning against him.

'_Life!_' Cooper snorts. 'How old are you?'

He hugs her to him. When Stacy was little, he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.

'Ow,' Cooper says. 'Your quill is stabbing me.' It's a black-and-white porcupine quill—she found it in the hills and uses it to pin up her long hair. Her father slides it out, and the tangled golden mass of Stacy's hair collapses onto her shoulders like a shattered window. She's aware of Finn watching.

'I like this,' Cooper says, squinting at the quill's translucent point. 'It's a dangerous weapon.'

'Weapons are necessary,' Finn says.

By the next afternoon, the safari-goers have settled into a hotel a half hour up the coast from Mombasa. On a white beach traversed by knobby-chested men selling beads and gourds, gamely appear in floral-print swimsuits, binoculars still at their necks. The livid Medusa tattoo on Thad's chest is less startling than his small potbelly—a disillusioning trait he shares with a number of the men, though not Cooper, who is lean, a little ropy, tanned from occasional surfing. He walks toward the cream-colored sea with his arm around Shelby, who looks even better than expected (and expectations were high) in her sparkling blue bikini.

Stacy and Stevie lie together under a palm tree. Stacy disdains the red Danskin one-piece her mother gave her for this trip, and decides she will borrow a pair of sharp scissors from the front desk and cut it into a bikini.

'I never want to go home,' she says sleepily.

'Yeah. But I miss Mom,' Stevie says sleepily, his gaze travelling to Shelby, to the glitter of her swimsuit through the pale water.

'Well Mom could come too. Then we'd never have to leave,' Stacy said, feeling like she's solved all the problems in the world.

'But Dad doesn't love her anymore,' Stevie says. 'She's not crazy enough.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

Stevie shrugs. 'You think he loves Shelby?'

'No way. He's tired of Shelby,'

'What if Shelby loves him?'

'Who cares?' Stacy says dully. 'They all love him,'

After his swim, Cooper goes in search of spears and snorkeling gear, resisting the temptation to follow Shelby back to their room, though clearly she'd like him to. She's gone bananas in the sack since they left the tents—hungry for it now, pawing Cooper's clothes off at odd moments, ready to start again when he's barely finished. He feels tenderly toward Shelby, now that the trip is winding down. She's studying at Berkeley, and Cooper has never travelled for a woman. It's doubtful that he'll lay eyes on her again.

Stevie is reading in the sand under a palm tree when Cooper gets back with the snorkeling equipment, but he puts aside 'The Hobbit' without protest and stands. Stacy bites her lip and ignores them, and Cooper wonders momentarily if he should have included her. But the thought passes and he and Stevie walk to the edge of the sea and pull on their masks and flippers, hanging their spears from belts at their sides. Stevie looks thin; he needs more exercise. He's timid in the water. His mother is a reader and a gardener, and Cooper is constantly having to fight her influence. He wishes that Stevie could live with him, but his lawyer just shakes his head whenever he mentions it. The fish are beautiful, easy targets, nibbling at coral. Cooper has speared seven by the time he realizes that Stevie hasn't killed a single one.

'What's the problem, son?' he asks, when they surface.

'I just like watching them,' Stevie says.

They've drifted toward a spit of rocks extending into the sea. Carefully they climb from the water. The tide pools throng with starfish and urchins and sea cucumbers; Stevie crouches, poring over them. Cooper's fish hang from a netted bag at his waist. From the beach, Shelby is watching them. She waves, and Cooper and Stevie wave back.

'Dad,' Stevie asks, lifting a tiny green crab from a tide pool, 'what do you think about Shelby?'

'Shelby's great. Why?'

The crab splays its little claws; Cooper notes with approval that his son knows how to hold it safely. Stevie squints up at him. 'You know. Is she the right amount of crazy?'

Cooper gives a hoot of laughter. He'd forgotten the earlier conversation, but his son forgets nothing—a quality that delights his father. 'She's crazy enough. But crazy isn't everything.'

'I think she's rude,' Stevie says.

'Rude to _you_?'

'No. To Joe.'

Cooper turns to his son, cocking his head. 'Joe?'

Stevie releases the crab and begins to tell the story. He remembers each thing—the porch, the stairs, 'Room 3'—realizing as he speaks how much he has wanted to tell his father this, as punishment to Shelby. Cooper listens keenly, without interrupting. But as Stevie goes on he senses the story landing heavily, in a way he doesn't understand. When he finishes talking, his father takes a long breath and lets it out. He looks back at the beach. It's nearly sunset, and people are shaking the fine white sand from their towels and packing up for the day. The hotel has a disco, and the group plans to go dancing there after dinner.

'When exactly did this happen?' Cooper asks.

'The same day as the lions—that night.' Stevie waits a moment, then asks, 'Why do you think she was rude like that?'

'Women are cunts,' his father says. 'That's why.'

Stevie gapes at him. His father is angry, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and without warning Stevie is angry, too: assailed by a deep, sickening rage that stirs in him very occasionally—most often when he and Stacy come back from a riotous weekend around their father's pool, rock stars jamming on the roof, guacamole and big pots of chili, to find their mother alone in her bungalow, drinking peppermint tea. Rage at this man who casts everyone aside.

'They are not—' He can't make himself repeat the word. Not even for his father.

'They are,' Cooper says tightly. 'Pretty soon you'll know it for sure.'

Stevie turns away from his father. There is nowhere to go, so he jumps into the sea and begins slowly paddling his way back toward the shore. The sun is low, the water choppy and full of shadows. Stevie imagines sharks just under his feet, but he doesn't turn or look back. He keeps swimming toward that white sand, knowing instinctively that his struggle to stay afloat is the most exquisite torture he can concoct for his father—knowing also that, if he sinks, his father will jump in instantly and save his son.

That night, Stevie and Stacy are allowed to have wine at dinner. Stevie dislikes the sour taste, but enjoys the swimmy blur it makes of his surroundings: the giant beaklike flowers all over the dining room; his father's speared fish cooked by the chef with olives and tomatoes; Shelby in a shimmery green dress. His father's arm is around her. He isn't angry anymore, so neither is Stevie.

Cooper has spent the past hour in bed, fucking Shelby senseless. Now he keeps one hand on her slim thigh, reaching under her hem, waiting for that cloudy look she gets. Cooper is a man who cannot tolerate defeat—can't _perceive_ it as anything but a spur to his own inevitable victory. He doesn't give a shit about Joe—Joe is invisible, Joe is nothing. (In fact, Joe has left the group and returned to his Mombasa apartment.) What matters now is that _Shelby_ understand this.

He refills the old ladies wineglasses until their cheeks are patchy and flushed. 'You still haven't taken me bird-watching,' he chides them. 'I keep asking, but it never happens.'

'We could go tomorrow,' one says. 'There are some coastal birds we're hoping to see.'

'Is that a promise?'

'A solemn promise.'

'Come on,' Stacy whispers to Stevie. 'Let's go outside.'

They slip from the crowded dining room and skitter onto the silvery beach. The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.

'It's like Hawaii,' Stevie says, wanting it to be true. The ingredients are there: the dark, the beach, his sister. But it doesn't feel the same.

'Without the rain,' Stacy says.

'Without Mom,' Stevie says.

'I think Dad's going to marry Shelby,' Stacy says.

'No way! He doesn't love her.'

'So? He can still marry her.'

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.

'She's not so bad,' Stacy says.

'I don't like her. And why are you the world's expert?'

Stacy shrugs. 'I know Dad.'

Stacy doesn't know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she'll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she'll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before her father rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between her brother and her father, who will have stopped speaking.

But Stacy _does_ know her father. He'll marry Shelby because that's what winning means, and because Shelby's eagerness to finish this odd episode and return to her studies will last until precisely the moment when she unlocks the door to her Berkeley apartment and walks into the smell of simmering lentils: one of the cheap stews that she and her roommates survive on. She'll collapse onto the swaybacked couch they found on the sidewalk and unpack her many books, realizing that in the weeks of lugging them through Africa she has read virtually nothing. And when the phone rings her heart will flip.

_Structural dissatisfaction:_ Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

Suddenly, Stevie and Stacy are galloping up the beach, drawn by the pulse of light and music from the open-air disco. They run barefoot into the crowd, trailing powdery sand onto a translucent dance floor overlaid on lozenges of flashing color. The shuddering bass line seems to interfere with Stevie's heartbeat.

'C'mon,' Stacy says. 'Let's dance.'

She begins to undulate in front of him—the way the new Stacy is planning to dance when she gets home. But Stevie is embarrassed; he can't dance that way. The rest of the group surrounds them. April, the twelve-year-old, is dancing with Finn, the actor. Brett flings his arms around one of the Phoenix-faction moms. Cooper and Shelby dance close together, their whole bodies touching, but Shelby is thinking of Joe, as she will, periodically, after marrying Cooper and having two daughters, Cooper's fifth and sixth children, in quick succession, as if sprinting against the inevitable drift of his attention. On paper he'll be penniless, and Shelby will end up working as a travel agent to support her little girls. For a time, her life will be joyless; the girls will seem to cry too much, and she'll think longingly of this trip to Africa as the last perfect moment of her life, when she still had a choice, when she was free and unencumbered. She'll dream senselessly, futilely, of Joe, wondering what he is doing at particular moments, and how her life would have turned out if she'd run away with him as he suggested, half joking, when she visited him in Room 3.

Later, of course, she'll recognize 'Joe' as nothing more than a focus of regret for her own immaturity and disastrous choices. When both her children are in high school, she'll finally resume her studies, complete her PhD at UCLA, and begin an academic career at forty-five, spending long periods doing social-structures field work in the Brazilian rain forest. Her eldest daughter, Beth, will go to work for Cooper, become his protégée, and inherit his business before having a tragically timed meeting at Windows on the World. Her youngest, Shelby Junior, will also move to New York and become a published writer, get married and have a daughter who she names after her sister.

'Look,' Stacy tells Stevie, over the music. 'The bird-watchers are watching us.'

The women are sitting on chairs beside the dance floor, waving in their long print dresses. It's the first time the children have seen them without binoculars.

'Maybe we remind them of birds,' Stacy says.

'Or maybe when there are no birds, they watch people,' Stevie says.

'Come on, Stevie,' Stacy says. 'Dance with me.'

She takes hold of his hands. As they move together, Stevie feels his self-consciousness miraculously fade, as if he were growing up right there on the dance floor, becoming a boy who dances with girls like his sister. Stacy feels it, too. In fact, this particular memory is one she'll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Steven has shot himself in the head in their father's house, aged twenty-eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparkling, shyly learning to dance. But the woman who remembers won't be Stacy; after Steven dies, she'll change her name—Stella—unlatching herself forever from the girl who danced with her brother in Africa. Stella will cut her hair short and go to law school. When she gives birth to a son, she'll want to name him Stevie, but her parents will still be too shattered for her to do this. So she'll call him that privately, just in her mind, and years later she'll stand with her mother among a crowd of cheering parents beside a field, watching him play, a dreamy look on his face as he glances at the sky.

'Stacy!' he says. 'Guess what I just figured out.'

Stacy leans toward her brother, who is grinning with his news. He cups both hands into her hair to be heard above the thudding beat. His warm, sweet breath fills her ear.

'I don't think those ladies were ever watching birds,' Steven says.

_**Next chapter: the last time we'll see Cooper**_

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	5. You Plural

_**Shortest chapter yet. Very emotional. Please REVIEW, I am depressed with only 1 :(**_

**Chapter Five: You (Plural)**

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties?

But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.

He's in the bedroom, in a hospital bed, tubes up his nose. The second stroke really knocked him out – the first one wasn't so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky. That's what Jesse told me on the phone. Jesse from high school, our old friend. He tracked me down at my mother's, even though she left San Francisco years ago and followed me to LA. Jesse the organiser, rounding people up from the old days to say goodbye to Cooper.

It seems you can find almost anyone on a computer. He found Brittany all the way in Seattle, with a different last name.

Artie is a maths professor. He still lives in San Francisco.

April ran away to Nebraska to be with her new husband, a retired actor. She hung up the phone the moment she heard Jesse's voice.

Of our old gang, only Puck has disappeared. No computer can find him.

Brittany and I stand by Cooper's bed, unsure what to do. We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying.

There were clues, hints about some bad alternative to being alive (we remembered them together over coffee, Brittany and I, before coming to see him – staring at each other's new faces across the plastic table, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood). There was Puck's mom, of course, who died from pills when we were still in high school, but she wasn't normal. My father, from AIDS, but I hardly saw him by then. Anyway, those were catastrophes. Not like this: prescriptions by the bed, a leaden smell of medicine and vacuumed carpet. It reminds me of being in the hospital. Not the smell, exactly (the hospital doesn't have carpets), but the dead air, the feeling of being far away from everything.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Instead I say, 'Hi, Cooper,' and at the very same time, Brittany says, 'Wow, everything is just the same!' and we both laugh.

Cooper smiles, and the shape of that smile, even with the yellow shocked teeth inside it, is familiar, a warm finger poking at my gut. His smile, coming open in this strange place.

'You girls. Still look gorgeous,' he gasps.

He's lying. I'm forty-three and so is Brittany. She's married with three children, in Seattle. I can't get over that. I'm back at my mother's again, trying to finish my BA at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours. 'Your desultory twenties,' my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I'm praying it's over. Some mornings, the sun looks wrong outside my window. I'll sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: It's finished. Everything went past, without me. Those days I know not to close my eyes for too long, or the fun will really start.

'Oh Cooper, we're two old bags – admit it,' Brittany says, swatting at his frail shoulder. She shows him the pictures of her kids, holding them close to his face.

'She's cute,' he says when she shows him her eldest, Quinn. I think he winks, or maybe it's his eye twitching.

'Cut it out,' Brittany says, but she's smiling. I don't say anything. I feel it – the finger – again. In my stomach.

'What about your kids?' Brittany asks Cooper. 'You see them much?'

'Some,' he says, in his strangled new voice.

He had six, from three marriages he bored through and then kicked away. Steven, the second oldest, was his favourite. Steven lived here, in this house, a gentle boy with blue eyes that broke a little whenever he stared down his father. Steven and I were the same age, exactly. Same birthday, same year. I used to imagine us, tiny babies in different hospitals, crying at the same time. We stood naked once, side by side, in a full-length mirror, trying to see if being born the same day had left a clue on his. Some mark we could find.

By the end, Steven wouldn't speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in.

Cooper's big bed with the crushed purple spread is gone – thank God. The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Cooper's tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Cooper into clear plastic bags that I try not to look at.

A dog barks. Cooper's eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse-butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.

So this is it – what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I can't help it, I start to cry. Brittany puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesn't hesitate. Her skin hangs a little loosely – freckled skin ages prematurely, Cooper told me once, and Brittany is all freckles. 'Our friend Brittany,' he'd said to me, 'she's doomed.'

'You have three children,' I sob into her hair.

'Shhh.'

'What do I have?'

Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies _on _computers. A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I'm trying to learn Japanese. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.

Three children. The oldest, Quinn, is almost the age I was when I met Cooper. I was seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could have been the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it's a punch line. 'It was all for no reason,' I say.

'That's never true,' Brittany says. 'You just haven't found the reason yet.'

The whole time, Brittany knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing, even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.

'I got lost,' I say.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she'll say, 'Forget the Japanese,' and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we'll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.

The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Cooper watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. 'Haven't been. Outside. In weeks,' he says, coughing a little. 'Haven't wanted to.'

Brittany pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital bed could cause an explosion. I'm afraid the real Cooper will be outside by the pool, where he lived, with a red phone on a long cord and a bowl of green apples, and the real Cooper and this old Cooper will have a fight. _How dare you? I've never had an old person in my house and I'm not going to start now. _Age, ugliness – they had no place. They would never get in from outside.

'There,' he says, meaning by the pool, like always.

There's still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a fruit shake next to it. The nurse-butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.

Or Steven? Could Steven still be here, taking care of his dad? Steven in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if he'd walked into a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Cooper yelling for me, 'Santana! Santana!' Steven and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I'd done by then.

In the mirror, Steven's chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.

And when it happened, in Steven's tiny bedroom, sun sneaking through the shades in stripes, I pretended it was new. He looked inside my eyes, and I felt how normal I could still be. We were smooth, both of us.

'Where's that. Thing?' Cooper asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to, in his red bathing suit, tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didn't hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?

The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. 'I got old,' he says.

The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.

'What about Steven?' I ask, my first words since 'Hi.'

Cooper blinks.

'Your son? Steven?' I try again.

Brittany shakes her head at me – my voice is too loud. I feel a kind of anger that fills up my head sometimes and rubs out my thoughts like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this pool – his son's, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.

Cooper is trying to speak. We lean close, listening. Habit, I guess.

'Stevie didn't make it,' he says.

'What are you talking about?' I say.

Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.

'What's the point, Santana?' Brittany asks me, and in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realise that I already knew about Steven. And Brittany knew – everyone knew. An old tragedy.

'He was. Twenty-eight,' Cooper says.

I shut my eyes.

'Long time ago,' he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest.

Yes, it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.

'Losing a child,' Brittany murmurs. 'I can't imagine it.'

The anger squeezes; it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Cooper's hospital bed; I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. I'm that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Brittany shrieking now; I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and we're just waiting, Cooper and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When he's absolutely still, I let him float to the top.

I open my eyes. No one has moved. Cooper is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Brittany is touching his chest.

It's a bad day. The sun hurts my head.

'I should kill you,' I say, looking at him straight. 'You deserve to die.'

'Enough,' Brittany says, with her sharp mother's voice.

Suddenly, Cooper looks in my eyes. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, that man who said, _You're the best thing that ever happened to me_, and _We'll see the whole goddamn world_, and _How come I need you so much?_ And _Looking for a ride, kiddo?_ Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it, on his bright red car. _Just tell me where_.

He looks scared, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. 'Too late,' he says.

Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Steven and I sat up there a whole night once , spying down on a party Cooper was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. 'Like a baby,' Steven said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.

Every night, my mother ticks off another day I've been clean. It's more than a year, my longest yet. 'Santana, you've got so much life in front of you,' she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there's a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.

Cooper is speaking again. Trying to speak. 'Stand on each side. Of me. Would you, girls?'

Brittany holds his hand, and I take the other one. It's not the same hand as before, it is bulbous and dry and heavy. Brittany and I look at each other across him. We're there, the three of us, like before. We're back to the beginning.

He's stopped crying. He's looking at his world. The pool, the tiles. We never did get to Africa, or anywhere. We barely left this house.

'Nice to be. With you girls,' he says, fighting to breathe. Clutching our hands, as if we might flee. But we don't. We look at the pool and we listen to the birds.

'Another minute,' he says. 'Thank you, girls. One more. Like this.'

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